


Always in Your Orbit

by flyingisland



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Canon-related angst, Childhood Friends Sheith, Garrison Shklance, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kerberos Failure, Light Bondage, Lighthearted Fistfighting, M/M, Oral Sex, Pre-Canon, Semi-Public Sex, Slow Burn, Slowburn Klance, Switching, Very Purposeful Voyeurism, pining shance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2018-12-09 10:50:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 30
Words: 162,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11667621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingisland/pseuds/flyingisland
Summary: Lance can’t stop pushing the envelope, Keith won’t stop running away, and Shiro’s just happy to come along for the ride.





	1. Two's Company

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Muzuki_chan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muzuki_chan/gifts).



> For Nuts, with much love.

The constant chatter in the locker room creates an endless pulse of energy that Lance feels, on his best days, he can get drunk off of. It’s the liveliness of each of his peers that recharges his battery after rigorous strength training—after a tiring session of jogging, lifting weights, and climbing the stereotypical rope in the middle of the gym that he truly would have thought was a myth perpetuated by children’s cartoons if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes.

Everyone gathers together in the locker room to take their showers and change back into their uniforms. They make jokes. They tell stories. They play silly pranks. There’s a sort of  _ magic _ in here. A wet, naked, _ musky  _ magic.

Hunk thinks that he’s crazy.

_ “It just smells like ball sweat, and everyone’s too loud, dude. The only thing that I ever feel in the locker room is the urge to hurl.” _

At the time, Lance had only breathed out of his nose loudly, rolling his eyes and making a dramatic show of telling Hunk just how wrong he was.

_ “No, Hunk, I’m serious! It’s inspirational! It’s like—so many guys just free to be guys, you know? Just dudes being dudes. Men free to bare it all and just embrace being men.” _

Hunk had looked at him as though he was going to say something, but he’d only shaken his head and returned to fiddling with the broken piece of machinery that he needed to fix for his engineering class instead. His cheeks had been smeared with black oil, giving him a rugged, Rambo-esque look that only infuriated Lance further. Somehow, despite the obvious manliness emanating off of even a yellow-belly like Hunk, he seemed to be completely in denial about how awesome their locker room time really was.

They were sitting in the space between both of their beds in their shared dorm—Hunk working on his homework, and Lance ignoring his own _ ,  _ scattered around the floor, for the sake of talking some sense into his dearest friend. He wasn’t even sure why he’d brought it up. It might have been Hunk complaining about the suicides that their coach made them run earlier in the day. Hunk’s schedule, as a mechanic, was on a different rotation than Lance’s, and gym class directly after breakfast was a complete act of sadism, according to him.

Lance had laughed at his horror stories of nearly keeling over during the fifth lap. He’d told Hunk that maybe going back for seconds on breakfast wasn’t a good idea. And he’d said, presumably,  _ “At least it’s fun once you get to the locker room, right?” _ and Hunk had stared at him as though he’d grown a second head.

_ “No, the locker room is the worst part, Lance. Are you serious right now?” _

He just didn’t understand the allure of spending time with the other members of his gender—the sorts of things that they were allowed to say and do; the comfort that one could find with his brethren that he couldn’t find within any group of women.

Girls were great, sure. He loved flirting with them in class and making eyes at them in the hallway, but sometimes, he’d mused (loudly and bluntly in hopes that Hunk would come to his senses), men just needed to spend special, personal, completely naked bonding time with other men.

And right now, in his current predicament, he wonders if Hunk had wanted to tell him  _ “That sounds pretty gay, dude” _ or  _ “If you keep getting so excited about naked guys, you’re gonna make a name for yourself that you’re not gonna like” _ . He thanks the lord for stopping Hunk from saying anything. He thanks whichever deity is watching over him for taking away Hunk’s ability to say _ “I told you so” _ when he finds out about this.

Because this is terrible. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to him, but thinking back to all of the warning signs, he really, truly should not be surprised.

And just how far back does this go? How long ago should he turn back time to find the root of all of these problems presented so unabashedly—so wet and slick and so absolutely revolting—right in front of him?

His heart is racing in his ears. His blood pools southbound at such an alarming rate that his head swims.

Far back, maybe all the way to the day that he was born, but if he’s honest with himself, it probably started the day that he met the headache named Keith Kogane.

 

* * *

 

Lance was still shrugging off jet lag and the slow-creeping loneliness that was already beginning to set in so soon after leaving his family at the airport when a bundle of uniforms was pushed into his arms. A gruff sergeant began barking orders at him to meet his roommate in the room printed at the top of the recruitment papers that he’d received in the mail.

There was a surreal air to the Galaxy Garrison—the slow-moving speed of the students around him, the deafening silence throughout the halls, the harsh fluorescent lights pouring down from overhead, and an overwhelming feeling of foreboding—but he’d chalked it up to exhaustion and shaken off his sleepiness before digging through his bag to find his papers.

Dinner at 5pm sharp, orientation at six. Currently, it was only four. At the very least, he was still awake enough to translate military time to something that actually meant anything to him, despite how much longer it took for him to understand  _ 1700 hours _ before his brain finally decided to work. But he had plenty of time for a shower and a short nap. He had plenty of time to get to know the guy who he’d be spending the next few years bunking with.

_ Hunk Garrett _ was the name stamped in bright red on his papers.  _ ‘Interests: culinary arts, video games, books about engineering and space travel’.  _ He wondered what kind of person a Hunk Garrett could be.

They were all equals on the first day, he thought, tucking the thick pile of files under his arm with the uniforms and dragging his luggage toward the hall labeled “Dormitories”. There was nothing stopping them from getting off on the right foot.

And he was charismatic. He was the most popular kid in school back home! _ “Most Likely to Become Famous - Lance McClain”— _ a permanent recommendation in the back page of his yearbook that he still felt a swell of pride thinking about now. This Hunk Garrett didn’t need to know that Lance was going to become the most talented fighter pilot that this place had ever seen.

He didn’t need to feel too intimidated just yet.

Lance could be cool. He could give the guy a chance to hang with the all-stars. He might even help him with his homework sometimes, who knows? He could be pretty charitable too.

Everything would be fine, he’d told himself. There was nothing lurking on the other side of that door that he couldn’t handle.

And thankfully, he was right. Hunk Garrett was a nice guy: laid back, funny, caring. He’d welcomed Lance with a friendly wave and a mouthful of food that smelled heavenly from its Tupperware container all the way across the room.

“You want some, man? I brought enough for like ten people.”

Lance’s belly had rumbled unceremoniously. They’d laughed, they’d eaten, and Hunk had told him about his dream of becoming a great engineer.

Lance might have been wrong about a lot of things that would happen at the Garrison, but he’d been right to trust someone like Hunk Garrett.

After their early dinner and heart-to-heart, Lance barely had enough time to shower and dry his hair before they were running late for orientation. Hunk had waited for him, nervously pacing and making small, jittery comments about getting in trouble on the day before their first day, and Lance had rolled his eyes at just how much all of this nagging was already starting to remind him of his mom.

They’d slipped into the auditorium just before the lights had dimmed. Spotlights turned toward the stage, blacking out the endless rows of seats in front of them. They found a few open spots near the back, Lance only half-listening as the dean took his place behind the podium and began a long and agonizing speech about space travel and the pride that could be found in helping one’s country.

The blackness of the room was an oppressive weight against his eyelids. His exhaustion hit him twofold as he listened to the low, monotonous voice of the dean droning on and on. For a moment, he hung between the worlds of reality and dreams, imagining that he was sleeping in his own bed again and that the incessant pokes in his side were his older brother messing with him and not Hunk desperately trying to wake him up.

The applause roused him, then the shifting air of people around him standing up. The feeling of Hunk’s big hand around his arm, pulling him to his feet. The little whispers below the noise telling him,  _ “I know you’re tired, dude, but you’re gonna get in trouble! Come on, Lance! I’m not kidding!” _

Everything was a blur for a moment. The clapping fading out to nothing, the feeling of floating back down to his seat. The lights flickering overhead as the dean announced the name of the next speaker— _ Star Fighter Pilot, Takashi Shirogane. _

When he’d thought back on this moment later on, he’d chalked it up to exhaustion—flustered, heart pounding, mind racing with a million thoughts. He’d never thought about his sexuality or the idea that he could be anything but straight. His mom had told him that he’d been flirting with girls since he was old enough to talk.

But the man who walked out on the stage was a beautiful man. Tall, robust, wide-shouldered with a boyishly handsome face. His inky hair had shined in the overbearing stage lights like black ocean water under the moon. His skin looked smooth even from so many seats away. He was firm but soft—Adonis carved from marble and wrapped in tanned silk. His eyes had been lit up and filled with the sort of love for the world that Lance thought only existed in the superheroes in comic books. Like Captain America or Superman—Takashi Shirogane was a god walking among men, the image of perfection that Lance had never had the pleasure of seeing in the flesh.

He’d swallowed hard, gripping tightly at the armrests on his seat. Hunk had flinched a little, whispering to him,  _ “Are you okay, dude? Are you getting sick?” _

But it was nothing like being sick. It was like hearing his mom sing to him for the first time. It was like feeling the soft warmth of sand between his toes, like catching a wave twice his size without plummeting into the water. It was like watching the vibrant blues of the sky fade out into the marvelous oranges and pinks of evening, then the deep, star-speckled, comforting night.

It was grounding and life-changing. A man like Takashi Shirogane saved lives with his smile. He surely must have dragged injured soldiers back from the dead with a flutter of his brilliantly full eyelashes alone. Lance suddenly wanted nothing more than to prove himself to this man, to stand up and blow his mind with all of the charisma and talent that he’d boasted of all his life.

He’d itched to try his hand at flight for the first time—to drag himself from a rookie to a seasoned pilot just to spend time in the same wavelength as someone like Takashi Shirogane.

“Dude, are you okay? You look like you’re about to have a stroke. Do I need to take you to the nurse?”

Hunk just didn’t understand. Lance didn’t know it at the time, but as the days went on, Hunk wouldn’t understand a lot of things that made perfect sense to him.

The roar of applause that followed the end of Takashi’s speech was akin to the sound of waves crashing to the shore. His cheeks were tinted pink and he bowed shallowly—charming even when he was flustered, entrancing even as he stumbled a bit on his way off of the stage. Lance imagined that everyone but Hunk could sense the special kind of energy that surrounded this man. He imagined that everyone around him was a rival for his undivided attention.

He hadn’t even thought that he was falling in love for the first time. For someone like Lance, every time that he laid eyes on a pretty girl, his heart and his mind and everything down below  _ always _ told him that he was falling in love again and again.

And it wasn’t that at all.

Even now, as he thinks back to this moment as the turning point between  _ Totally Heterosexual Lance McClain _ and  _ Maybe Not As Straight As He’d Originally Thought Lance McClain _ , he refuses to believe that it was anything but absolute admiration that had lead him to fight so hard for Takashi Shirogane’s attention.

The showerheads are beating water down on the tile with a resonant patter that reminds him of that applause. Takashi Shirogane’s cheeks are just as pink as they were that very first day.

Keith raises an eyebrow, cocking his hip to the side, glaring at Lance as though he has no reason to be just as mortified as everyone else in this current predicament—and Lance hates him more now than he’s ever hated him in his entire life. He hates Keith more than he’s ever hated _ anything _ in his entire life.

“Can we help you?” he asks, all vinegar and poison.

And Lance doesn’t blame Shiro for this at all. No, those weird thoughts and feelings were completely out of Shiro’s control. This is Keith’s fault—it’s  _ always _ Keith’s fault. No bad thing that happens to Lance for the rest of his life will be anything but Keith Kogane’s fault.

This all started with Keith being a complete and utter prick.

And maybe, finally, it will end that way too.

 

* * *

 

Lance hadn’t noticed Keith immediately. He was the kind of nondescript, moody loner that Lance’s mom had always cautioned against associating with. He’d heard some of the girls in his classes whispering about the cool guy with the long, dark hair and the dreamy eyes that you could  _ “just get lost in” _ , but he’d ignored it—too distracted by his own need to be liked by his peers to bother worrying about some random bad boy who would probably get expelled within the first few weeks anyway.

He just wasn’t interested in getting mixed up in any wrongdoings while he was living at the Garrison on a scholarship. His mom was overjoyed when he’d told her—flying colors, he’d cried. He’d passed his entrance exams with flying colors. Her baby was leaving their hometown for bigger things—the first in their family so far—and the pride that he’d found in her teary smile that day was enough to convince him not to mess up his chances over whatever mundane nonsense the other students were getting themselves so worked up over.

So the cute guy liked to smoke cigarettes between classes. So he’d already been caught sneaking out of his dorm room late at night to see  _ someone _ who they still couldn’t identify—big deal, he’d told himself. It sounded like just the kind of trouble that he didn’t need to get mixed up with.

“Did you hear about that new guy?” Hunk had asked him after class one day, long after hearing about this elusive dreamboat had went from annoying to downright maddening, “I mean, we’re also new guys, but that’s what all of the older guys in my engineering class keep calling him. Apparently they say he’s really good—Shiro put in a glowing recommendation for him or something. They went all the way to some orphanage in Kentucky just to pick him up—can you believe that?”

Lance was only barely listening as Hunk rambled. There was a cute girl passing them in the hall, smiling and giggling as he pulled out his most suave finger guns and winked in her direction. He liked it here already. He was doing well in his classes. The date of their first flight simulation loomed so close in the future that he could already feel the machinery whirring around him. It was so much easier to impress the girls here when they knew that he had the same dreams that they had. He wouldn’t have to pretend that he knew anything about marine biology or cared about psychology. He wouldn’t have to tell them that he had an imaginary aunt who was a nurse and loved it, or that his cousin in the United States was a seasoned photographer who could definitely book her a few gigs if she’d go on a date with him.

There was far less pressure to impress. There was nothing holding him back from blowing everyone away in the simulations. Even the murmurs about that mysterious bad boy were starting to fade from wonderment to horror—as he’d apparently been caught fighting three times since orientation, and the only thing even keeping him at the Garrison was the good word that Shiro had put in for him.

So yes, he might have heard about that hotshot a few times, he told Hunk finally. He might have already heard about him too much, as a matter of fact.

He didn’t have a lot of experience with hate at first sight—or even hating someone before he even got the chance to lay eyes on them at all. Everyone knew each other back home. His physics teacher was his neighbor. Their pastor was his best friend’s dad. He couldn’t remember the last time that he had to introduce himself to anyone before he’d left home, and he definitely wasn’t familiar with hearing so many things about a person, before he even got the chance to meet them, that he didn’t like them already.

As far as he was concerned, the bad boy just wasn’t worth his time. It didn’t matter if Shiro thought he was all that—no matter how much that thought pooled a confusing kind of white hot anger in the deepest pits of his belly—and it didn’t matter if all of the girls seemed completely enamored with the guy.

Hunk wilted, lowering the hands that he was waving around so animatedly as he’d raved. Lance felt a little guilty for putting such a damper on his good mood, but he reasoned with himself that it was probably better to keep Hunk away from that kind of person as well. Hunk was as straight-laced as they came. He didn’t like to sneak out. He didn’t like to break any rules or regulations that weren’t smuggling the flavorless slop that they served in the cafeteria into their dorm room to add just enough spices to it to make it taste like real food again.

At the very least, he didn’t have to lie when his mom asked him if he was eating well during their daily phonecalls. He’d already told her that he didn’t feel lonely at all—that he’d made loads of friends along with Hunk and that all of the girls were vying for his phone number.

She might have sensed his lie with that last one anyway. Even back home, he hadn’t had a lot of luck with the ladies.

“Look, Hunk,” he said, snapping out of his internal monologue and attempting to mend the situation, “I just don’t think that guy’s worth our time, okay? It doesn’t really matter what Shiro says about him. If he fails the simulation, he’s not any better than anyone else around here, and if he keeps starting trouble, they’re going to send him packing.”

Hunk mulled that over for a moment, a finger to his lips as they rounded the corner toward their room.

“Where would you even go after getting kicked out of here though—I mean, if they’d picked you up at an orphanage? He’s gotta be at least eighteen, so it’s not like they’ll take him back. You’d think he’d be a little bit more careful, you know, with—”

“What does it matter where he’s gonna go, Hunk? He can find himself a nice shack in the desert for all I care! All I’m saying is that getting mixed up with that guy is only going to make things harder, okay? He’s not some big celebrity! He’s just a hothead who thinks that he’s the shit because he’s tricked Shiro into thinking that he’s gonna be talented or something!”

He ignored Hunk’s pitiful whisper of  _ “Well, that’s kind of harsh, don’t you think?” _ as he slammed open their door and stomped inside. It was the first of very few arguments that they’d ever have as friends, and Lance was already sick of it.

He didn’t want to waste his time talking about the tragic backstory of some guy who would most likely only ever be a side character in his own story. He needed to focus on the flight simulator. He needed to focus on studying. He needed to keep his nose clean and his eyes pointed directly ahead of him—all the way along the winding path that would lead him to the spot of  _ “Star Fighter Pilot” _ and Shiro’s kind, prideful smile.

Hunk slinked off to the bathroom for a shower, and Lance flopped down on his bed. As he faded into a restless sleep—wrinkling his uniform in a way that would only add to his stress in the morning—his thoughts swirled with images of Shiro speaking on the stage, of imagined pictures of what that mysterious bad boy might look like, and what sort of relationship they must have had for Shiro to recommend him in the first place.

In the blur of half-consciousness, he could finally admit that it bothered him, but he didn’t understand why. Obviously, Shiro had a lot of friends. Obviously, there were a lot of girls after his heart.

But some of the other students whispered about a tenderness between Shiro and this other wannabe pilot. They called it _ “borderline romantic”. _

He already hated the person who would someday introduce himself as Keith Kogane.

But he told himself, naively, that this bad boy would never be more than a single page in the book of his own life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello there! This is a collab that lemoninagin and I have been working on for the last few weeks, that we've been very excited to finally share! This first chapter is pretty short, but fortunately, we've saved up about 70k words at this point, so as of right now, we have enough done to post consistently each week for the next three months or so. There isn't a set posting schedule at this point, but it will definitely be updated weekly!
> 
> This first chapter was purely me, but as we go on, our writing is going to mix a lot more. If you manage to point out where each chapter changes hands, well... something neat will happen, I'm sure. 
> 
> We really hope that you enjoyed this first chapter! See you next week!


	2. Three's A Party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything continues to be Keith's fault.

So Lance was wrong. About one thing, anyway.

Keith Kogane was no amateur, and he more than forced that bit of knowledge down everybody’s throats during the first day of simulation tryouts.

Lance didn’t really like thinking about it anymore than he had to, because that gave him about a hundred more reasons why he should hate every inch of Keith, why he should detest his very presence. Not two minutes into his run, the show-off bad boy himself had aced his program. Aced it! Among a tight knit crowd of his fellow classmates, from Lance’s observation of the small monitor of the going on’s inside the ship, Keith barely even looked like he’d touched the damn controls.

Keith’s hands had smoothed over them, like they were more an extension of his body than separate foreign machinery. He’d hit the throttle with practiced ease. Any turbulence or run-ins with imaginary sharp ravines and dangerous terrain, had been maneuvered through easily like he was a bored kid toying with a remote-controlled airplane.

And not only that, Lance thought bitterly as applause exploded around him, only irritating him more as he’d have given anything to be on the receiving end of such high praise.

There was an abundance of murmuring, a rustle and wave of astonished gasps and whispers among the crowd of his peers.

“ _He’s beaten Officer Shirogane’s entry level record score_ ,” they said, disbelief etched in their awed voices. Some boys standing near Lance chimed in with, “ _No one’s ever gotten anything that high before in so little time!_ ”. There was the collective chattering of girls cooing things like, “ _God, that guy’s so perfect and dreamy”, “He’s so cool!”,_ and  _“Even with that hairstyle, I’d definitely still fuck him”_.

Lance felt that familiar anger, that white-hot flick of something still unidentified burning in his veins. Keith wasn’t just a rumored legend, and he wasn’t recommended by Shiro in any sort of flippant manner at all. For some reason, Lance found that that’s what he was stuck on most.

That was, until Keith revealed himself from the shadows.

Because Keith Kogane was quiet when the terminal screen went dark and he stepped through the opening hatch to the sounds of ringing applause and various catcalls and whistles. His cheeks didn’t go pink like Shiro’s in proper embarrassment and modesty like they should have.

He didn’t smile, either. There was no smugness or self-satisfaction resting in the lines of his downturned lips. He wasn’t pushing his chest out in hubris, or changing his posture to anything that could be construed as rubbing bravado in Lance’s—or in anyone else’s, really—already downtrodden face.

Keith just looked uncomfortable—like he was displaced, like he’d have rather been anywhere else but under some showy spotlight. There was an obvious layer of disinterest there, even. The only sign of life from him was in those jerky twitches of his fingers, as if he hadn’t quite realized yet that they were no longer touching anything.

With a mop of unruly black hair in the shape of an even more unfortunate haircut, and practically dwarfed in his overlarge flight suit, Keith was a far cry from giving off a bad boy vibe. He didn’t look like he had nearly enough energy to be an excitable, beaming poster boy for the Garrison one day.

He appeared to be lost, like a child that strayed too far from their parent and didn’t know how to retrace their steps to go find them again.

It was infuriating. To Lance, that was just so much  _worse,_ because there was no  _appreciation_ there. Keith wasn’t just bending his silver spoon, he was grinding it between his stupid, perfectly straight, white teeth.

What a tool, Lance had thought. What an unworthy candidate to be the possible new face spread over the Garrison’s glossy recruitment brochures. Shiro had terrible taste, and clearly, he still does.

Keith’s shoulders were disrespectfully slumped until Commander Iverson corrected him to stand at attention, though the command was softer than Lance had ever heard coming from such an intense instructor.

When Iverson congratulated him, Lance felt like he’d seen more than enough. It was the icing on his cake to his veritable ego-death.

That shameful first run of his seemingly never ending failures in the simulation had been scheduled to start that next day, a memory Lance is not at all interested in ever revisiting. Back then, Lance thought about how he’d show this Keith character a thing or two about skill.

He placated his rising fury by imagining how he’d shove his victory so hard in Keith’s face, he’d get whiplash. That he’d grind him into the metaphorical dirt, where he’d end up exposed as the fraud he was, vulnerable and ashamed under Lance’s following boastful laughter, because Lance’s scores would be triple what his would be.

There was nothing more he had wanted than to put that frumpy looking, overgrown mullet-wearing orphan in his place, hard and fast and raw. Lance had gotten it into his head, naively enough, that he was going to make the guy fall to his knees in defeat, prostrated and begging beneath him while he took his rightful place as alpha-male.

Lance considers now, that there was probably more than a few things off with the wording of his thoughts then. Given his current situation, he has to admit he still wants to do those things, but not necessarily for the same underlying reasons.

Either way, he’d been a fool at the time, for sure, for ever thinking he could be capable of being good enough to hold any kind of victory over someone like Keith, a person born with an endlessly irritating amount of natural born talent.

Lance stalked off huffily after that without a second thought, but that glimpse he caught of Keith’s face when Iverson moved to pat him on the back—it changed something in him.

Their eyes met through the crowd for that brief moment. Lance felt like time itself stopped moving around him when those calculating, dark pupils locked onto his own. Wisps of Keith’s messy, dark hair bounced when he tilted his head, leveling a look that was unmistakably one in Lance’s direction.

No, Lance didn’t quite turn away fast enough to escape from the feelings that bubbled up within him from such a simple gesture. He didn’t turn away fast enough at all to miss that small, curious quirk of upturned lips.

But he wished he had.

 

* * *

 

The locker room was supposed to be his safe space, but now it’s been tainted.

It’s all Keith’s fault, entirely, without a doubt. There’s no denying that.

There’s no denying that at all, Lance thinks as he squeaks out some stilted response, hand still gripping hard into the fabric of his towel, which did not end up making contact with some unsuspecting fellow bro’s ass.

It’s all in good fun. That’s what guys do. When they’re having a bad day, or when they want to relieve some tension, or maybe when they’re just bored and need to vent out some excess masculine energy, they let loose by whipping a towel against another man’s bare skin.

It’s in all the really good movies, and nothing ever gets weird because of it. It’s a bonding experience. Lance used to do it loads of times at his old high school, which—yeah, ok, so maybe he’d been knocked out cold on his ass for that more times than he’s really been keeping track of.

It’s not his fault, it’s still Keith’s. He wasn’t supposed to be the one behind the curtain. He wasn’t worthy of being even one fraction manly enough for Lance to want to bond by catching him off guard and listening to the resounding  _crack_ of his wet towel as it smacked against that sculpted ass.

And he most surely, most definitely, should not be trying to cramp another body in with him into such a small, personal bonding space.

“Cargo pilot,” Keith’s voice is calling out to him, but it sounds far-off, echoey against the tile, like it’s reaching out to Lance through the fine threads of a vicious fever dream. It isn’t until Keith repeats himself, that Lance shakes his head, pointedly avoiding trying to look anywhere at them, but—

There’s practically nowhere else for his eyes to go.

Through the steam, through the heavy drumming of water against an unbelievable amount of bare, pale skin, it’s unmistakable that the sight in front of him is very much a real thing that’s happening. Dumb, _‘thinks-he-knows-it-all’_ Keith Kogane, ace fighter pilot, and Takashi Shirogane, his flawless idol from afar, are, they’re—

Shiro’s skin looks slippery and tempting underneath the possessive hand Keith has spread over one of his hips. Lance hasn’t even realized that’s where his eyes have decided that was the best place to land until Keith is rudely snapping his fingers in his face.

“Hey, are you even listening to me, cargo pilot?” Keith barks, leaning in towards Shiro, who’s been quietly watching them through the thick of his wet bangs as if all of this is somehow normal. “Either stop letting the warm air out, or come in. Jesus fucking Christ, make a decision already. I’ve asked you like three times now.”

Keith grins, that terrible, handsome grin he sometimes gets which Lance immediately recognizes from all that time spent scrutinizing him through the simulation monitors. He presses that cocky grin into Shiro’s flushed neck, smooths those obnoxious lips over a freshly sucked mark that’s redder than even Shiro’s skin.

He darts a pink, pink tongue out, and swipes it up towards that sturdy, defined jawline. Lance finally drops the towel. Keith Kogane, in all his bare-assed glory, is watching him with one eye open as he laps at Takashi fucking Shirogane’s outstretched neck.

“You were just kissing Officer Shirogane,” Lance forces out, pointing, unable to say anything other than the obvious. He blows all the breath gathered in his lungs out in one large  _whoosh_ of air. “You were...you were  _kissing_ him in the boy’s locker room. In the shower. On the lips. Oh my god. And you’re  _still_ doing it.”

Keith shrugs, his arm winding farther down Shiro’s thigh, down and around to a place that Lance is having an incredible amount of trouble reminding himself why his gaze shouldn’t follow.

“And  _you’re_ still standing there, being an asshole after rudely interrupting us.”

Through the soft whimper Shiro gives, he smiles a bit—contained, warm, just as bright as it always is. It’s just completely different given the context now versus when he’s teaching in front of a class, or giving an animated, gentle speech to a crowd of anxious cadets.

Lance doesn’t know why he’s still holding the curtain. Lance doesn’t know why he’s still staring, or why his feet feel completely rooted to the ground. He doesn’t even have the emotional capacity to feel like a proper fool for reacting so awkwardly when all he can feel is the rage of heat burning through his veins.

“I’ll say it one more time,” Keith hisses, before biting down into Shiro’s neck. “Fuck off, or come in.”

Shiro jerks, head snapping back hard against the tiled wall behind him, mouth forming a surprised _‘o’._ Whatever noise he makes gets swallowed by the beating of water.

Lance hates that. He hates that Keith is close enough to hear it, but he isn’t.

Shiro’s completely on display to Lance, hips facing towards him, all chiseled abdominals and gorgeous rippling muscle, just like Lance has always imagined—except better. Much better. Keith apparently has no qualms about sliding one palm infuriatingly slowly across his heaving chest, and tweaking a nipple.

Lance gulps. His legs are quivering, his boxers feel like painful constricting spandex over his groin. It’s all too much, too quickly.

It’s surreal when he finds he’s still capable of speech. “Come in?” He asks, eyes widening when Shiro’s arms fold themselves around Keith’s waist, and tug him closer, close enough that Lance’s view of Shiro’s gorgeous body is now blocked by Keith’s perfect, tight little ass.

“What...I don’t…” Lance swallows through the sandpapery coating in his throat. “I don’t understand…”

Keith stops his careful ministrations, and throws Lance a withering look over his shoulder, as if Lance is just now interrupting them.

As if he’s completely forgotten he’s even been there at all.

Lance grips so hard into the curtain he’s surprised it isn’t tearing. He may or not be cursing, rambling out of habit about how much Keith sucks, how much he’s going to beat him once he  _‘faces him like a man and puts his damn clothes back on’._ Keith continues ignoring him, turning back to give Shiro his full attention with some more slutty tongue work, probably.

It’s hard to tell with Keith’s body shielding him what exactly they’re getting up to now, but when Shiro’s head drops back down so he can cradle his chin onto Keith’s shoulder, he’s staring right at him.

Lance chokes over the insults tumbling up his throat.

“Keith…” Shiro speaks up for the first time, eyes lidding and long lashes weighed down with tiny droplets of water. “I think he’s jealous.”

Lance isn’t sure if his eyes are playing tricks on him or not—which, considering everything that’s happened so far, may very well still be true—but it looks like Keith is very subtly, very gently rocking into him.

Shiro still sounds like the Shiro Lance knows—or  _thought_ he knew. His words still ring with a tenderness, with that even, level-headed tone. He sounds sympathetic at least, unlike that asshole Keith, and that alone has Lance really reflecting on what he’s being offered here.

_Fuck off, or come in._

Keith has the gall to laugh. “Is he really still here?”

All the blood rushing south stops just enough for Lance to feel some rise into his cheeks. There’s no way, after all his bitching about the cold air, that Keith would ever genuinely believe he’d gone.

“Fuck you, Keith,” Lance grits out, releasing the curtain and stepping just the barest inch into the shower. The backsplash of water causes a breeze that plays with the open edges of his boxers, and droplets flick sharply against his arms. Steam curls around his ankles and thighs.

He’s had about enough of this attitude. He’s had enough of being left in the dark. He only came here to whip some dude’s asses. He didn’t sign up for this.

But he finally gets the reaction he was seeking, or at least, something close enough to make him feel like he’s regained some control over the situation. Keith turns when he bites out his name like it’s a particularly bad curse word within itself. In the stretch of his eyes, Lance feels something familiar sitting there—as if he’s seen this expression on Keith somewhere before, somehow.

There’s an awkward pause. Shiro fills it with some low, needy whine that has Lance almost slipping and falling flat on his face.

“Fine,” Keith sighs, relenting. He moves away so that Lance is rewarded with the glorious view of Shiro again, breathless and leaning against the wall. “Shiro, go on. Explain to him what we mean.”

Two things happen simultaneously before Lance can even hope to regain proper brain function ever again.

First, Keith drags him forward by the arm, while Shiro’s large, warm hands cup his face. He’s fully immersed within the almost scalding water in seconds, but every thing’s slick and hot and perfect.

Shiro presses up tightly against him, no shame at all in doing so naked with a complete stranger. Lance finds himself really staring into those kind, murky grey irises for the second time. He’s never, ever been this close to Shiro before, and his heart thunders in his chest, thumping in time with the rhythm of streaming water.

“Lance,” Shiro leans in, whispering into his ear. Lance flicks his gaze to Keith, who’s watching them like a hawk, though he looks perturbed by the fact he probably can’t hear them too well, if at all.

 _Good_ , Lance thinks, smiling out of sheer self-satisfaction. Keith glares back at him, and crosses his arms.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says softly, staring down at him with those dark, hooded eyes, “about Keith, I mean. He doesn’t—he doesn’t mean to be like this.”

They stare at each other for a long moment. Lance can see his own reddened, doe-eyed face reflected back at him in Shiro’s eyes. He tells himself that you can’t see your own reflection in a dream, but he isn’t even sure if that’s true or not. He isn’t sure of anything as Shiro’s big hand comes up to stroke lightly along his cheek.

“Can I kiss you, Lance?”

Shiro knows his name.

The realization sets in belatedly, but  _Takashi Shirogane knows his name_.

In all of his daydreams and all of his shameful late-night fantasies, Shiro has never, ever known his name.

He swallows hard, his tongue feeling too clumsy and fat in his mouth to articulate any of the thoughts currently racing at lightning speed through his head. Shiro is kissing him, and his lips are warm and soft. His fingers are slow and gentle as they thread through Lance’s wet hair.

Someone laughs outside of the shower, just a few feet away. The booming of the water beating against the tile fades into nothing but background noise, and Lance realizes, unfortunately, exactly where he is and what he’s doing here.

He feels suddenly too exposed. He understands, with anxiety cooling the warmth deep down in his belly, that anyone could hear them or _find them_ if they paid close enough attention.

Keith is watching, his face a steel trap. There’s no way to know what might be going on inside of his head.

This has to be some kind of prank.

Before Lance even knows what he’s doing, he’s placing his hands flat on Shiro’s chest, smashing him against the wall only inches away and barreling out of the shower back into the steamy locker room. There are so many eyes on him. His boxers are soaked, clinging uncomfortably to the erection still prodding out, still hoping that he might go back in there and finish what he’s started.

He’s throwing on his clothes, shirt buttoned unevenly, his fly still down. He’s picking up his boots and flying barefoot out into the hall. He doesn’t even listen to the Commander yelling at him that he shouldn’t be out here when he’s not properly dressed.

Everything's a blur of too-loud sounds and vibrant colors until he finds himself safely inside of his room, back planted against the door, chest heaving erratically.

The first decipherable noise that he hears, once his breathing evens and his heart stops threatening to leap out of his chest, is Hunk’s voice prompting him, “Lance! Lance, seriously! Lance, is everything okay?! Do I actually need to call the nurse this time?!”

Hunk is on his knees in front of him. Their room is filled with the smell of sesame seed oil. There’s something sizzling on the contraband hot plate across the room—the one that Hunk meticulously pieced together with spare parts within the first week that they arrived.

“Dude you’re soaked.” Hunk tells him—and he is, he realizes, completely and utterly soaked. “Did you like, slip in the shower? Did someone throw you in there as, uh, like a _‘manly bonding prank’_ or something?”

Lance can’t find the will to say much, but after some time passes, he finally manages to mutter one word—with the last of his strength, with the fiery anger of a thousand suns.

“ _Keith_.”

Hunk lets out a long sigh, rising from his knees and returning to their private dinner. He doesn’t ask any other questions, and for whatever reason, that bothers Lance for the rest of the night.

Once he changes his clothes, then hangs his soaked uniform above the radiator to dry, he settles into his bed, telling Hunk feebly that he doesn’t have the appetite to eat anything.

He wonders why he’s the only one who seems to be reacting like a normal human being. He wonders why he’s the only one surprised by any of this.

His heart thrums in his chest. His eyes feel heavy as he listens to the crackle of Hunk’s hot plate between their beds.

_Shiro knows his name._

Somehow, this is enough to salvage an otherwise disaster of a day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again, we are back! Although this is a Lemon-heavy chapter, I've standing in as the "publisher" since she's been very busy lately. I told her that her chapter was up to be posted today and her response was, "We've written so much since then... I don't even remember writing that."
> 
> We've managed to finish another 10k since the last time that we saw you guys, so hopefully you can bear with us! 
> 
> Anyway, as always, thank you so much for taking the time to read this! We really appreciate everyone who took the time to comment, kudo, and subscribe last week! Hopefully, as this story continues to get longer, you guys will continue to enjoy it!
> 
> See you next week!


	3. The Boy Through the Bars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was a sad story, Shiro knows that now.  
> But back then, months before he even learned his name, he’d thought that Keith Kogane was amazing.

Shiro knows that Keith would readily take the blame for what has now been dubbed “The Locker Room Incident” (or as Lance has called it during the few times that he’s managed to berate Keith between classes without running away: _“An Absolute Betrayal of a Sacred Safe Space”_ ), but there’s a small part of him—his honor, maybe, or even his deep love for his boyfriend that won’t allow him to tarnish his good name—that knows that he needs to come clean.

Maybe Lance thought that everything was an accident. Maybe he thinks that Keith set the whole thing up. He still hasn’t managed to bring up the fact that neither of them are scheduled to have gym anywhere near the time when they would reasonably be expected to run into him in the locker room, but maybe the cogs are already turning in his mind.

Lance might think that the whole thing was a prank—subtle bullying, or a not-so-subtle powerplay. It’s not unusual for people to misunderstand Keith’s motives, or to shove their own ideals onto him. It’s not completely unreasonable of him to believe that Lance might actually think that Keith is capable of hating someone so much that he would stage that entire situation just to get at him somehow.

But it’s not that simple, and frankly, Shiro doesn’t see the point in dragging out this lie any longer than he has to.

He’ll tell Lance, when Lance is finally comfortable talking to them again.

He’ll explain everything. He’ll clear the air.

He’ll tell him how their plan began on the day of orientation, with a gaping boy in the auditorium, and how all of this started so long ago, when he first met Keith Kogane.

 

* * *

 

Shiro had always known that Keith would be great someday. He could always sense that something about Keith was just a little bit _better_ than everyone else.

The apartment complex where he’d moved at twelve was nothing particularly impressive. His single mother, a fresh-faced, newly graduated lawyer, had accepted the cushy job at a firm nearly seven hundred miles away from their previous home in a small town in Kentucky—and while saying goodbye to his friends had been sad, and entering school with only his older brother to support him had been the most terrifying experience of his young life, Shiro had decided that he would accept this grim reality and make the best of a very unfortunate situation.

He would catch the bus in the early morning and eat breakfast with the other twelve or so latchkey kids in the cafeteria. He would watch the night fade out into the powdery blues of the morning through the wide, fingerprint-smudged windows looking out into the courtyard. He’d work on his homework and read whichever book he’d checked out from the library. He would make friends with a few other students with busy parents, and they would talk about Saturday morning cartoons over microwaved scrambled eggs and pancakes that were the size and consistency of hockey pucks.

And in the evening after school, he would opt out of another bus-ride in favor of getting some fresh air. He’d walk down the cracked sidewalk, kicking idly at the tangled weeds peeking through the holes. He would pass by the drug store with flashing red lights; the fast food restaurants, the bookstore, and the tall, black brick silhouette of the orphanage looming like a monstrous shadow just outside of town.

Beyond the thick darkness of the woods around it, he would pass through a neighborhood with identical houses. Past that was his apartment complex—the drab, disappointing, leaky and creaky thing that his mom swore they’d only live in until their lease ran out.

The gates surrounding the orphanage were a gnarled wrought iron with chipping paint. Like the twisted black branches of horror movie trees, they warned him to stay away. There was an ugliness to that place that many townspeople spoke of: a bad energy, a sadness, a force so oppressive that it might suck the energy out of the entire town someday. It was an eyesore just outside of such a picturesque place. He’d noticed it when they’d first moved in, and he’d wondered about it fearfully—what kind of people lived there, how bad a “Children’s Home” could really be.

His mother always told him never to talk to anyone on his way home. She always told him to keep going until he locked their apartment door behind him.

But sometimes, when the weather was nice, the kids holed up inside of the orphanage would come out and play. Sometimes he’d slow down and watch them. Sometimes, he’d come as close to those scary bars as he could manage, and he would wonder what kind of life the children lead inside.

“If you get too close, this place will eat you up and never let you come out.”

A boy spoke to him one day, jarring him out of his trance while he watched a few kids his age running around with a football in the grass. The boy was a scruffy, sour-faced little thing surely at least three years younger than himself. He was standing a good five feet away, his voice whistling through missing teeth, a big, filthy band-aid smudged with dirt and old blood across his nose—the only treatment for the many little scratches that also spread along his face.

He looked too small in his oversized t-shirt and ill-fitting shorts. His sneakers were so worn that the soles flopped when he walked.

Shiro was almost thirteen years old at that point. He was almost a teenager. He was almost in high school.

But he ran.

He ran from that kid and that horrible story, from that terrifying, ugly place. He ran so fast that he could barely catch his breath once he made it into his room. His brother had rushed in and wiped the tears from his cheeks, consoled him and teased him about “being a man” until he finally calmed down.

The TV in the living room was crackling. The antennas never seemed to sit in just the right position for a clear view. On the news, they were talking about abuse allegations at the local orphanage, and Shiro cried and cried, and swore to himself that he would never stop walking on his way home ever again.

His mom had always said that he was sensitive. She’d always told him never to lose his compassion for his fellow man.

It was stupid to be afraid of that boy and that tall, unsightly building. It was ridiculous to even consider that such a place could ever hold him captive forever.

Shiro would return to those gates three days later. He’d hesitate as he sped by.

He would watch the kids playing on the cracked, sizzling asphalt—he’d watch them throwing wilting basketballs through a dented hoop. He’d watch the girls playing jump rope and hopscotch and laughing as though they weren’t being held hostage at all.

He’d look for the boy with the oversized shirt and all of the scratches, and he’d find him fighting a group of bigger kids at the other end of the yard.

It was a sad story, he knows that now.

But back then, months before he even learned his name, he’d thought that Keith Kogane was amazing.

 

* * *

 

Keith is fiddling with the cuffs of his uniform, attempting to pull them up over his gloves in a way that their commanding officers might not notice them.

“It’s not a good idea,” Shiro tells him, “You’ll get a demerit. Are the gloves really worth it?”

Keith scowls, cursing under his breath, but he doesn’t mess with them anymore.

They’re watching the sunset through the windows near the back of the library. Keith is squinting grumpily somewhere deep into the sky. The oranges and pinks of late evening pour light through the wide glass of the window, illuminating all of the hidden colors in Keith’s eyes. He looks more lively at this time of the day, more normal and human, even with the frown that rarely leaves his face. Shiro wonders if he feels ordinary here, just like everyone else, or if the peculiarity of his situation always sticks to his skin, no matter how far away he travels.

“Has Lance said anything to you?” he asks, flicking his gaze away from Keith’s face, at least attempting to pretend that he’s actually studying, as they’d originally planned.

“Of course he has.” Keith scoffs, snapping his head away from the window and resting his face in his hand. “He calls me a _‘dirty, cheating bastard’_ just about every day. He keeps telling me that he’s going to fight me, but he never actually goes through with it.”

Shiro laughs softly, but he can’t help but wonder what “cheating” has to do with anything that Lance witnessed in the locker room that day. It could be something else, of course, and it wouldn’t be the first time that someone confused Shiro’s recommendation to recruit him as some kind of free pass. He wonders if Keith knows all of the things that people are saying about him—if he realizes that he’s been the talk of the Garrison since he first wowed everyone with his simulation scores, but he knows better than to ask.

Keith doesn’t like to talk about it. He knows that he has talent. He knows that he has the passion to do anything that he puts his mind to. He just hasn’t quite gotten the hang of accepting praise with anything but utmost awkwardness and aloofness.

“I think we should tell him, you know, about our plan.”

Keith looks as him as though he’s gone insane.

“And what’s the fun in that? Isn’t the whole point of this to watch him squirm?”

Shiro laughs again, but they both know that he’d never agree to anything like that. Keith knows very well exactly what his intentions are—he knows exactly what they want to happen and what they should avoid. Shiro has faith in Keith, and he knows that Keith has more experience dealing with Lance, despite the fact that they never seem to get along.

He decides to wait, for now, until the time is right to speak up.

Maybe it will be better to see how things play out. Maybe it will be beneficial to all of them if Lance comes around on his own.

For now, he only continues stealing little glances at Keith as the sun finally sets and the warning bells tell them that there are only a few hours left until curfew. He finds himself losing focus on the words in his book, the notes that he’s written in the margins. He finds himself wondering if this moment could only be more perfect if there was another person sitting in the empty chair across the table.

None of this is normal, he tells himself, but abnormal isn’t really so bad.

 

* * *

 

Shiro squared his shoulders. Today, he was really going to do it. He’d prepared for it in the safety of his apartment last night. All he needed now, was to gather the courage to go through with his plan.

He blew out the stuck air in his throat, and drew nearer to the tall, foreboding bars. “Hey,” he called softly to the boy sitting in the grass behind the gate.

Today, the boy had exchanged his large t-shirt for an even larger, uglier green sweatshirt, and Shiro had almost mistaken him for part of the shrubbery nearby. It was a brisk fall afternoon, but the sun was beating down enough that the dingy yard was full and busy with playing, laughing children.

Except for him. He was curled into a tight ball near the gate, knees drawn to his chin, immersed in reading a book, seemingly aloof to any of the interaction going on around him.  

When Shiro spoke, the book jumped from his hands, and he lept to his feet. Immediately, Shiro felt bad. He hadn’t meant to scare him.

Turning, he held two tiny fists up, as if prepared to fight. Shiro flinched away from the bars. There was a nasty, purplish-green bruise under one of his eyes, and it was startling, to say the least.

“Oh, it’s just you,” the boy said, sounding relieved as he relaxed somewhat and shuffled closer to the bars, “I thought you’d gone forever. You ran away pretty fast last time.”

Shiro puffed out his cheeks, feeling them warm up as he replied with an uneasy, “...You said this place would eat me.”

“It was just a joke,” the boy scoffed flatly, raising an eyebrow and looking at him in amusement. “Why? You get scared?”

Shiro felt suddenly self-conscious about the whole thing. A joke. Of course it was a joke. But why did he have to say it in such a creepy way? He wanted to say more about that, maybe even defend himself a little. A lot of the other kids at school called him names, like scaredy-cat and chicken when he was younger. When it came down to it, he guessed he didn’t have a leg to stand on most times when he would run from any situation at the first sign of a threat.

And he surely didn’t have one now, considering the way he’d taken off and cried like a baby because of some awkward, teasing words. He decided it was best to steer the conversation away from that as best as he could.

“No,” he replied, looking away as his hands tightened around the straps of his backpack, “I’ve just been...busy.”

The boy rolled his eyes, like he could easily see how transparent he was. He crossed his arms, drawing attention to several band aids that were covering his knuckles. “So, what the Hell do you want?”

Shiro didn’t know what he was expecting, really, by doing this. But all in all, he could say he _really_ wasn’t expecting that reaction. The curse sent an itch skittering up his spine. Being in middle school, he was far from a stranger to hearing harsh language like that, but it was a little jarring coming from someone so young. If his mother ever heard him talk like that, she would have had him washing his mouth out with soap in an instant.

“What’s your name?” Shiro asked, palm hesitating over the bars of the gate.

He spent many times passing by in fear of somehow catching a sickness from the place, almost, spent many nights dreaming about the bars turning into black, tar like snakes that would reach out and ensnare him, try to eat him alive and swallow him whole.

This time, however, he let the cool metal touch his skin. He sighed in relief when nothing bad happened. It was just a regular, old iron gate.

The boy swiped one grubby sleeve under his nose, sniffling a little. His voice sounded different this time, more nasally, like maybe he had a cold. His brows furrowed into a deep scowl as he peered at him almost suspiciously, his response laced with an uncalled for edge of aggression.

“What’s it to you?”

Taken aback, Shiro hadn’t known what to say. He wasn’t used to such belligerence from a complete stranger. “...I was just wondering,” he finally replied, quietly.

They both stared for a few beats — the boy, looking almost as if he was sizing him up as he raked his eyes over him and tilted his head; Shiro, breath caught in his throat and heart pounding in his chest with still fresh fear that the kid might attempt to strike him, like he’d seen him do to the other boys.

It didn’t appear that he was going to actually reveal what his name was, so Shiro scratched the back of his neck, before letting his bag slip to the ground. He unzipped it and reached in, acutely aware that he was being watched intently. He pushed the extra onigiri he’d asked his brother to pack for him towards the boy.

“Uh, here,” Shiro choked out, starting to feel a little more foolish about his plan than he had last night. It was a bit harder to do this face-to-face after all his time spent watching from afar. “You always look hungry, so I brought an extra one today.”

There was surprise there, resting in his dark pupils, and the boy shifted his body back from the bars. Still, he reached out for the onigiri, but stopped about midway to it.

“What do you want for it?” he asked slowly, eyes still narrowed, “I don’t have any money. The older boys stole all I had earlier.”

Something unusual had tugged within Shiro’s chest then, like a fist constricting around his heart. He’d never gotten such a close look at the kid before, and it was even more obvious at this distance how emaciated and small he was, how shallow the color of his face appeared upon already sharp, angular cheekbones. His hair was overgrown and unkempt, resting right below his chin, and he kept having to push it away from his eyes as he spoke.

“I...I don’t want anything for it,” Shiro said, confused, having a hard time grasping the concept that this boy didn’t seem to understand what being given a gift was. “It’s, you know...it’s just for you to have. For free.”

The boy still looked at it skeptically for another moment. Shiro stretched his arm further through the bars, nodding and smiling to let him know it was perfectly okay to just grab it.

And grab it, he did. The boy swiped it so quickly, it was gone in the time it had taken Shiro to blink. He retreated a few steps again, unwrapping the cellophane with equally as eager movements, and Shiro watched in thinly veiled horror as he stuffed the entire thing into his mouth in one go.

He had thought then, about what his mother might say to such manners. How she would probably shriek in a high pitched voice, worrying about how the boy might choke. Shiro thought about how she would swoop in with a large glass of water while shaking her head at his dirty hands with all that grime caked beneath his fingernails, completely unsuitable for eating with. How she would make him wash them first, and dote on him about as much as she would chastise his behavior.

Shiro didn’t know what possessed him to stay after that. His plan had only been to drop off the food, and run. But he realized, as he stood there awkwardly, that his fear had more than waned, and been replaced with a sort of melancholy instead. There was something about this boy that interested him, that made him want to know more about who he was as a person.

“Do they do that to you a lot?” Shiro asked, leaning against the bars and trying to make idle chat as the boy scarfed down the rice, “You know, take your things? Is that why you’re always fighting them?”

He knew it was probably rude to ask prying questions like this. There was a small feeling of shame at what his mother might say if she heard him saying stuff like that, but he hadn’t realized until just now, how ridiculously curious he’d been to find answers. It all came tumbling out before he could really think better of it.

Luckily, he didn’t seem bothered by it. The boy merely shrugged, gulping some of the large mound of food stuffed within his cheeks. Shiro gave him a moment to chew, but when he swallowed, he still didn’t answer his question.

Surprisingly, though, he did continue talking. “I see you come by here a lot, but it hasn’t been for very long, I think.”

The boy furrowed his brows again, as if he seemed unsure of how time was passing. As if he’d maybe lost track of all the days Shiro spent watching, loitering around the decrepit place. Shiro wondered, for the first time, what his bedroom might look like. He wondered if maybe he didn’t have the luxury of having a nice calendar bearing the newest models of spaceships like him, tacked to his bulletin board.

He wondered if he shared his room with one person, like he did with his own brother, or if maybe he just lived in a large, open area with all the other kids in one room, like he remembers seeing when he read that book _Madeline_ as a young boy, which was about the extent of his knowledge on what happens when a bunch of kids live together.

Even if he didn’t realize how long it’d actually been, Shiro wasn’t expecting this boy to apparently be about as observant of himself as he’d been taking note of him.

The boy plucked the remaining rice stuck from his lips, and popped them into his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully. “You new in town? Who are you?”

“I’m Takashi Shirogane. I moved here with my brother and mom a few months ago,” Shiro said, smiling gently, satisfied to at least see the thin, sickly looking boy eat something. If he didn’t feel like answering any questions, Shiro supposed that was perfectly fine. He’d only wanted to do something nice for him. “But you can call me Shiro. Everyone calls me Shiro.”

It was a careful, contained sort of smile, that he got in return. Slow to unfold, and cock-eyed, like the boy wasn’t used to doing it.

But to Shiro, it was the best smile he’d ever seen. In Shiro’s eyes, it spread much wider, like the rays of the sun that were beating down and stretching over his face just then, shining brightly on one of the large gaps in his front teeth.

“Okay then, Takashi,” he said, in a tone lighter and less defensive than before. He gave him a weird little wave, more a flutter of fingers than anything, and pushed off from the bars. They rattled precariously, and Shiro jumped back, startled.

The boy snorted out a soft laugh before he turned and said, “I’ll see you around, I guess.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lemon told me, “The Boy Through the Bars is my favorite chapter”, which I can’t honestly argue with too much, haha! Although I have a pretty big soft spot for chapters eleven and fifteen as well… Honestly, it’s hard to choose! But this one was a lot of fun to write anyway.
> 
> This story took on a really interesting… life of its own, so to speak, and I hope you guys enjoy the ride just as much as we have so far! 
> 
> As always, thank you so much for reading/commenting/subscribing/leaving kudos! See you next Monday!


	4. Fortune Favors the Bold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belated introductions, midday trysts, and a lot of weird bug metaphors.

Late in the night, Shiro ignores the sound of his roommate snoring as he cracks open a textbook under his blankets. He clicks his tiny flashlight on and off a few times, more out of anxiety than actually testing the battery. He can’t bring himself to focus on the words on the page, but giving his eyes something to do while his mind turns over all of the thoughts in his head—endlessly flipping through them like a rolodex of embarrassment and regret—proves to be far easier on his psyche than staring up at the dark ceiling and forcing himself to relive Lance’s humiliated face over and over again on the back of his eyelids.

It’s been two weeks now, and despite how much Keith reassures him that everything is fine, Lance still won’t come anywhere near him.

“He’s a stubborn idiot,” is what Keith keeps telling him,, “It’s not like he’s telling me anything useful either. Just, _‘Stay out of my head, mullet!’_ and _‘You won’t even let me sleep anymore!’_ every time that I see him after class. What the Hell does that even mean? Our dorms are in different halls, how am I stopping him from sleeping?!”

He’s gotten so good at mocking Lance lately that he’s even perfected the tiny crack of his voice—the scandalized little shriek that he’d let out before pushing Shiro backwards and tumbling out onto the locker room floor.

The words in his flight manual jitter and move about. Exhaustion blurs his vision. Shiro thinks about Keith’s checkered smile when they were kids. He thinks about passing food through the narrow bars of the gate that separated them.

He thinks about the fact that convincing Keith to be his friend had been no easy feat either. It had taken months upon months of hard work and dedication to even learn his name.

Shiro wonders if he has a knack for attracting difficult people—and if this means that he, by association, might also be a difficult person. He isn’t sure what it is about himself that makes it so hard to connect with people, what makes them so attracted to only the glass that he wears on the outside that reflects back to them everything that they want to see, and nothing that he really is.

Inside, Shiro wonders if he simply shoots far below their expectations—if all of the students and commanders who respect him would still want him around if they knew how much of a coward he is deep down.

He’s been chosen to pilot a spacecraft to Kerberos. He’s been selected as the most qualified soldier for the job.

He’s tangled Keith in this horrible web for over a decade now, and at the end of this year, he’s going to leave him behind.

Lance is handsome and he’s charismatic. He’s a funny guy who attracts those who find comfort in a person who never takes anything too seriously. He forces Keith to face his own accomplishments, to admit to himself that he’s outshined another person who might have wanted his spot as _Top Fighter Pilot_ far more than he did. Shiro can see the insecurity that sleeps inside of Lance, and he knows that Lance admires a person like Keith—someone who won’t ever let the world see the ugly, vulnerable underbelly that he guards so desperately—despite how adamant he is that he can’t stand to even look at him.

Shiro knows that he has nothing to worry about, but while his flashlight shudders and the batteries abruptly die, he wonders what Keith would do if he went away and never came back.

A year is already a very long time.

He wonders if he can trust Keith in Lance’s capable and caring, but clumsy hands.

 

* * *

 

It took Shiro a whopping six months, and three more days before Keith finally told him his name.

April 12, 2006. A day that Shiro saw as even more important than his own birthday, in some regards.

Those past six months, while sneaking around to add extra food into his lunch in any way he could, he gradually learned as much as he could otherwise.

Two weeks into pushing onigiris through the gates, two weeks of not getting even a mumbled _‘thank you’_ , just the ravenous response of Keith stuffing his face, he mentioned that he could leave the yard at certain times, but because he never really had anywhere to go, he didn’t bother.

Shiro went home that day, and spent all night thinking about why he would have brought that up.

His mother asked him why he was so tired that next morning as he nearly dozed off in his bowl of cheerios. He’d come up with another foolproof plan, though.

He came back the next day with more food—rice still warm in its bento box, as he’d opted to walk to school in hopes of catching Keith outside on the way. And he was there, which Shiro understands now, but he definitely didn’t back then. He would come to learn that Keith stayed outside from the time that they unlocked the doors in the morning to the moment before they locked them at night.

He spent his days playing alone far away from everyone else. It seemed back then, as though Keith wanted nothing more than to stay outside of the orphanage as long as he could possibly manage. Shiro didn’t get it, but it made it easier to find him, so he really couldn’t complain.

The winter chill was still lingering in the air mid-April that year. Shiro was bundled up in a jacket and a scarf, shoving his mittens into his pockets to get a better grip on Keith’s breakfast. But Keith was still in the same t-shirt, still in the same tattered pants. He was kicking about the clumps of mud that had accumulated under the uneven grass in the yard, stabbing at the exposed earth with a stick in his hands, and seeming entirely too focused on whatever he was imagining that he might be killing for Shiro’s comfort.

Shiro wondered if he should offer to let him borrow his Gameboy. It might have been a healthier way to express his endless urge to hurt things.

Every day and every evening after that, Shiro began to bring Keith food. He wasn’t sure what to call him still, as Keith rarely said anything that wasn’t foreboding or cryptic during their short meetings, but he found himself growing dependent on this routine—waiting impatiently for school to let out so he could talk to Keith about space travel, waking up early so he could bring him breakfast while it was still hot.

By this point, his mother was starting to lament about where all their food was going, and how with just the three of them, it could even be possible to be spending this much on groceries. His brother had placated her whenever it came up, saying a gentle, “ _Ma, Shiro’s just going through puberty. He’s still growing a lot, and he’s gotta eat. It’s gonna be okay”._

Ryou would turn to him in those moments if he was nearby, and give him a suspicious raise of an eyebrow, but otherwise didn’t say anything to him about it. The rest of the conversation would turn into hushed whispers of rapid Japanese, but Shiro wasn’t stupid. He picked up enough of the language from both of them to know exactly when he was being talked about.

She seemed alright with that for a while, but when Shiro began packing an entire second lunch, her worries turned into bigger, more frantic things, things like if maybe one of them had a tapeworm, or that maybe she wasn’t being a good enough mother, because she thought she wasn’t paying enough attention to them to notice just how much Shiro was growing.

Shiro was never discouraged by her nervous questioning, or the knowing glances that Ryou sometimes sent his way when he caught him packing so much food. His days began to rely on Keith’s company—on the interesting views that he seemed to have on just about everything, to the simple solutions that he found to all of Shiro’s problems.

Granted, usually he just told Shiro to solve every simple misunderstanding by punching the other person in the face, but his abstract point of view was still refreshing even if his advice wasn’t any good.

Shiro started to notice the patterns in Keith’s behavior after time passed. He noticed the way that he always read the same book every day. A filthy old thing about outdated fighter jets, it looked like some of the older kids had taken turns stomping it into a mud puddle many months ago.

Keith still handled it as though it was precious, despite that. He’d turn the pages gently and never let Shiro grab it if he wanted to show him a photo through the bars. He had very few things that seemed to really belong to him—that book, the clothes on his back, and a large knife that he kept hidden under the waistband of his pants at all times—and Shiro wondered which three things _he_ would choose, if he could only choose three items to carry with him for the rest of his life.

Well, his Gameboy, probably, and the piggybank on his desk that had amassed twenty-three dollars over the last few years. Even if he used the money on something else, he could always fill it up again.

He’d thought long and hard later in the night about his third treasure, about which thing he would like to carry with him no matter where he went. He’d stared up at his ceiling all night in the dark, watching the shadows move about the walls each time a car drove by down on the street below, listening to the sound of tires squealing and cats yowling and Ryou snoring in his bed across the room.

And he’d known then what his final treasure was—which thing he would never want to lose no matter what.

It was the boy behind the bars of the orphanage, the boy who taught him not to be afraid, who opened up so gradually and allowed him to peek into the heart of another person for the very first time in his life.

He didn’t know how to tell someone that he never wanted to let them go. He didn’t even really understand what that had meant back then. He just knew that he wanted to see Keith again when he woke up in the morning, and every day after that until the end of time.

“Why’re you always so nice to me, Takashi?” Keith asked him one day, seemingly out of nowhere. He was turning the stripped stick he’d just whittled with his pocketknife, over and over again in his hands, clearly avoiding looking him in the eyes.

As if maybe he was afraid of what possible rejection might be lying there when Shiro answered the question.

They’d been hanging out at a nearby abandoned park lately, which was usually devoid of people and had a nice, quiet pond in the thick of the woods. It was one of the first places Shiro took Keith to get him out of the yard, having scoped it out because he discovered that Keith got overwhelmed easily by large crowds and the more bustling part of the town.

The beginning signs of oncoming spring were laced heavy in the warmer air. Shiro remembers the heat of the sun sticking across his bare legs where he’d rolled up his pants, the sweetness of honeysuckle and blooming wildflowers under his nose.

Shiro remembers the wave of Keith’s hair he’d memorized even back then, the boyish grin tugging up his lips as he’d pulled the blade over the bark. He remembers noticing for the first time that since they’d been getting more sun lately, Keith had a few freckles across his nose. The color of his cheeks were finally starting to look healthy and rosier, like a normal boy his age’s should be.

“Why wouldn’t I be? You should be nice to your friends, shouldn’t you?” Shiro felt his forehead crease with the question, and he remembers how the earth beneath him felt suddenly hollow, how a shudder had run across his skin at how Keith could even begin to ask such a sad thing.

When he didn’t respond, Shiro only smiled, and shook his head.

“You really seemed like you could use a friend when I met you,” he explained honestly, stretching his legs out into the grass and sighing at the feeling of the breeze blowing the long blades across his bare feet. He leaned heavily back against the tree, hands laced behind his head. Letting his eyes drift shut, he watched the bright colors of the sun play along the inside of his eyelids, deep blotches of red and blue spotting them. “So, I wanted to be your friend.”

The whistle of branches was the only sound between the two of them for a while. Fat, puffy clouds drifted lazily above them. An airplane left vapor trails in the sky, buzzing along with the insects. Time passed quietly, serenely.

“Keith,” Keith eventually broke the easy silence, softly.

“Huh?” Shiro popped one eye open to look over at him. He hadn’t quite heard him over the chattering of some birds playing within the branches. “You say something?”

His fingers were set upon his bony knees, knuckles dusted white, like maybe he was digging his fingernails into them.

“My name,” he spoke a little louder, a little more irritably, like Shiro was more accustomed to hearing, “You wanted to know it for whatever stupid reason. So, it’s Keith.”

“Keith,” Shiro repeated back, liking the way it sounded when it pushed out between his teeth. “Well, I guess it’s finally nice to meet you, then.”

Keith dropped the stick and shoved him, playfully. “Shut up,” he griped, but he was smiling. His adult teeth had grown in at the top, but he’d been missing two bottom molars, and his smile was so wide, Shiro could see them, plain as day.

Shiro pushed him back. They roughhoused for a while in the grass and dirt, staining their knees green and the palms of their hands brown, laughing and shouting. They climbed the tree and threw rocks down into the pond until the sun crept under the horizon. Shiro nudged Keith, told him gently that they should probably go. He went down the tree first, stretched a hand up to Keith to help where his short legs couldn’t quite reach the bottom branches.

Shiro walked him to those gates, wishing he didn’t have to say goodbye. Watching as those unwelcoming steel doors swallowed him up, like the jaws of some terrible machine that really could chew him up and spit him out, Shiro tried to tell himself that everything would be alright in the end.

His mother had shrieked when he came home around dusk, forcing him to go bathe immediately and scolding him for coming home so late without even calling her, but Shiro barely heard her.

After his bath and being told to go to his room to do homework with no TV time, Shiro practically threw his backpack across the room in his excitement.

Smiling until his cheeks hurt, Shiro marked the day on his calendar, under the _Model 007_ Jet.

 

* * *

 

Keith downs an entire water bottle in one gulp, but the food on his lunch tray remains untouched. Shiro eyes him warily for a moment, wondering if it’s time for another lecture. His hair is still wet from the showers, clinging to the sides of his face and wetting the collar of his shirt. His eyes are glazed with fading adrenaline, and Shiro knows that he always gets especially worked up after self-defense lessons.

There’s a hand creeping up his thigh.

Right on time, he tells himself.

Keith’s hand doesn’t move even as another tray clatters against the table. Matt is already telling them a story about some kid in his class before he even manages to sit down. The hand on Shiro’s thigh creeps upward, circling toward the seam. Keith is watching Matt with a stoic expression, the corners of his lips turning up ever-so slightly as Matt laughs.

“—He just has no idea what he’s talking about, man. Can you believe that he’s seriously made it to the end of the program when he doesn’t even know what a mid fuselage propeller is?”

“Yeah, what kind of an idiot doesn’t know what _that_ is?” Keith asks flatly, smearing ketchup around his plate with a wilted fry. His other hand continues to slide up Shiro’s leg, until finally, he’s ghosting his fingers over the fly.

For a split second, he grins, the sharp corners of his canines peeking through the crack of his lips. Shiro swallows thickly, ears on fire as he turns his face down to his own lunch. Neither he nor Keith are really surprised by the bulge already tenting the front of his pants, but that doesn’t stop Keith from gloating about it.

Quietly and _subtly_ , at least.

“I know it doesn’t mean anything to a pilot, but that’s kind of a rudimentary thing for us, okay? It would be like—like a pilot not knowing where the gear shift is or something!”

Matt’s flailing his hands about in the air wildly. Shiro says a silent prayer for forgiveness, swearing to himself that he’ll make this up to him while they’re on the Kerberos mission, no matter what it takes.

Keith takes a bite out of his fry, chewing for a little bit too long and watching Matt with steely eyes.

“Yeah, it is kind of _hard_ for me to understand. Is it _hard_ for you too, Shiro?”

Shiro flinches.

The hand on his crotch is stroking him dreadfully slow. He’s aching at this point, so lightheaded that he can barely focus on the conversation at all.

There are so many people chattering innocently around them. There’s Matt sitting less than two feet away. Keith knows better than this. He knows that it’s a dirty trick to pull something like this out in the open.

Shiro thanks whichever God is looking out for him that Lance doesn’t share their lunch period.

It takes him a moment to realize that both Keith and Matt are staring at him, waiting for his response. After an awkward stretch of silence, he nods dumbly, and Matt asks him if he’s okay. The sound that comes out of his mouth is so far from human and so much closer to a dying mouse than any noise he’s ever made before.

“I-I’m good—I-I just…I need to lie down for a minute.”

He’s up in seconds, wobbling unsteadily as he shields himself with his half-empty tray. As he’s speeding off, he can hear Keith telling Matt that he should probably help him to the nurse’s office. Exactly on script, as always.

No wonder Lance is intimidated by Keith. Sometimes, Shiro feels a little blown away himself.

He barely makes it down the hall before he can feel Keith closing in on him. Those determined eyes burn tiny holes into every exposed stretch of skin that they can find. It’s always been this way, he thinks, ever since they were kids. He’s always felt, beneath Keith’s gaze, like an ant running in circles under a magnifying glass. And somehow, despite holding the handle, Keith only looks at him with adoration and love.

He wonders if this is the sort of thing that makes a person like Lance hate Keith. He wonders if not everyone can stomach the blunt honesty, the intensity, or the unyielding willpower that it takes to climb so quickly to the top of the pack. It had taken him two semesters of tireless practice to reach the simulator score that Keith had shattered on his first day. It had taken him years of growing and loving, hurting and being hurt by other people, to learn the harsh realities that Keith had known even before he’d lost all of his baby teeth.

He wonders if not everyone is willing to look at someone who burns as bright as Keith Kogane. He wonders if not everyone is brave enough to stand still on that hot spot under the magnifying glass for too long.

Keith’s hands are grasping at his uniform jacket before he can jump too far down the _“insect vs. sadistic child metaphor”_ rabbit hole. There aren’t too many people out in the halls around this time of day, but he’s thankful for the small act of discretion that Keith grants him regardless—tugging him toward the first open door that he can find before dragging him eagerly inside.

They’re slipping into the locker room again—the automatic lights flickering on overhead as Shiro finds, relieved, that no one else is inside.

Keith is dragging his teeth and lips down his throat, pushing him through the door and against the nearest row of lockers with a surprising amount of force.

“D-did you really—” he gulps down a groan as Keith’s knee slides up between his legs, cradling the erection that was just starting to fade away. “Did you really have to do _that_ in front of Matt?”

Keith’s laughter is a hot vibration against his skin. His hands are leaving tremors of sensation everywhere that they dance beneath his shirt. He doesn’t know when Keith unbuttoned it. He doesn’t remember those warm hands sliding up under the edges and traveling to his chest.

He keens as a jagged, blunted nail scrapes against his nipple. He can barely contain a needy groan as Keith bites down hard between his shoulder and neck.

There’s a wet tongue prodding his new bite mark. There are words like fire humming against his skin.

“What, do you want him to think that you’re single when you guys are stuck on that ship alone together for a year? Do you think he doesn’t know about us by now?”

It’s blunt and rude, but the anger that Shiro expected from Keith just isn’t there. Keith’s hand slides down his chest, cupping his erection and squeezing gently. He continues to nibble along Shiro’s shoulder, stopping every so often to suck or bite. He takes his time as his fingers work down the the fly and tug open the button, allowing Shiro’s cock to free itself from the front of his pants.

“I—I was going to t-tell you, I just—”

“It’s what you wanted,” Keith cuts him off. He’s pumping slow and leisurely, sliding his thumb over the precum already leaking from the head of Shiro’s dick. His eyes are hooded and clouded with lust. He isn’t looking at Shiro’s face, but staring, distantly, at the work that he’s doing between his legs. “It’s what _I_ wanted. Did you really think that I was going to be mad at you for going away?”

Keith drops down to his knees in slow motion. There’s something tugging inside of Shiro’s chest. His eyes sting, touched by Keith’s understanding, wondering how he could have ever expected anything else.

His thoughts slip away as Keith’s mouth swallows him up. The automatic lights flicker off, leaving him to watch Keith’s shadowed head bobbing in the dark. Between his fingers, he tugs lightly at Keith’s overgrown hair, so many memories floating around in the back of his thoughts as he considers how many times he’s watched this hair get cut and grow back again. It’s been over ten years. They’ve been playing this slow game of cat and mouse for over a decade. He goes away, and Keith finds him. He watches Keith surpass his expectations again and again.

He thinks that someday they’ll get tired of meeting and growing distant, of testing the amount of space that they can put between each other before someone goes away for good, but every time, Keith bounces back with a vitality that throws everything that he thought he knew about the world completely out of perspective.

He tips his head back against the locker. He can hear all of his embarrassing noises echoing back to him in the wide, empty room.

He sighs long and deep as he cums. He can feel Keith pull back and open his mouth to catch the mess.

And his eyes sting as light bursts around them, as the sound of the door swinging open and hitting the wall booms louder than anything he’s ever heard before.

He can feel Keith jump. There’s a blurry figure standing completely frozen at the door.

“Are you—”

It’s a familiar voice.

Keith is laughing. Shiro’s eyes adjust to the light slowly, the fuzziness of his orgasm finally fading away.

“ _Are you fucking kidding me right now_?”

Lance slams the door behind him. Even from the other side, they can hear him booking it down the hall.

He wonders if Keith knew that Lance would come in here around this time. It’s far too much of a coincidence if not. Keith wipes the spilled cum from the corner of his mouth, a grin so cocky on his lips that Shiro wants to pin him down and ravish him all over again.

“He followed us,” Keith says finally, “I thought he’d been tailing us for a while, but…he really followed us in here.”

His laughter is always a beautiful surprise. It bounces off of the walls, fading out and in, enveloping Shiro in a warm heat that dulls his embarrassment just enough to help him think straight.

Shiro wonders when he stopped being an active planner in this situation and started being a pawn. He wonders when Keith started being so conniving. He wonders why all of this doesn’t intimidate him, but only turns him on.

And he wonders how much longer it will be now, until Lance finally joins them instead of running away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today's chapter is a day late. Sorry about that! I took a mini road trip yesterday to watch the eclipse, which was... dark, I guess? Very, very dark. 
> 
> Anywho, if you're ever worried about chapter updates or any story-related stuff, you can check out my (flyingisland's) [twitter](https://twitter.com/MothIsland) or [tumblr](https://curionabang.tumblr.com/) for information (my tag for this story on tumblr is ["rambling-about-aiyo"](https://curionabang.tumblr.com/tagged/rambling-about-aiyo)!), since I usually post about delays in advance, or you can just shoot me a message and we can talk fics or something. 
> 
> As always, thank you so much to everyone who has supported this story so far! See you guys next week!


	5. Curry and Rice for the Lovesick Soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I know they have lots of ointments and creams in the nurse’s ward, but I’m telling you, curry is medicine for the soul. And right now, I think you need all of the help you can get. You’ve had a rough month, buddy, I can tell.”

 

With much fussing from Hunk, Lance finally drags himself out of bed fifteen hours after he’d burrowed under his blankets in the first place.

It’s gotten to the point where Hunk doesn’t ask questions at all—opting instead to simply purse his lips and mind his own business, offering gifts of delicious food as his comfort where he sometimes fails with small-talk.

It’s not that Hunk isn’t the most supportive person that he knows, Lance thinks, it’s just…

He doesn’t exactly have a lot of experience with what Lance is going through, if his stance on the whole locker room disagreement is any indication. As it is, Hunk doesn’t really seem to be interested in _anyone_ at the Garrison—let alone some insufferable maniac and the hunky dreamboat that he has wrapped around his stupid finger. If Lance didn’t know any better, he’d think that Hunk really was so determined to achieve his dream that he wasn’t willing to even look at anyone else.

He envies that sort of dedication, really, but he’s only human. Until recently, he hadn’t seen any harm in window-shopping for a potential partner between classes and during their weekends off.

Hunk might counter that it _is_ their weekend off and Lance hasn’t looked at anything but the light peeking through the fibers of his blanket, but luckily, he’s too busy with his contraband curry to make any tall accusations.

“Listen Lance,” he does say, ladling a hearty portion of curry over a bowl of rice, “I know they have lots of ointments and creams in the nurse’s ward, but I’m telling you, curry is medicine for the _soul_. And right now, I think you need all of the help you can get. You’ve had a rough month, buddy, I can tell.”

He passes the bowl up to Lance, warning him idly not to spill it as he fetches him a spoon.

He doesn’t say anything else until they’re midway through their meals.

“Look,” he says slowly, swirling his spoon around in his bowl, looking anywhere but in Lance’s direction, “Why don’t you just… get it all off of your chest, okay? Just let it all out, no judgement, I swear. This is a judgement free zone, man. Whatever freaky stuff is going on with you and Keith and Shiro—I’m your friend and I’m gonna love you no matter what.”

Lance can feel the curry settling far too hot and heavy in the pit of his stomach. Somewhere in there, his anxiety writhes impatiently. He thinks again of his mom back home—how no matter what happened, she would always be sure to remind him of how much she loved him, and how much his happiness meant to everyone around him.

 _“There’s nothing that you can’t tell me,”_ she used to say, _“nothing in this universe could make me love you any less.”_

His homesickness has begun to settle over him like a second skin. Talking to his family for an hour on the phone will never feel the same as hugging them, or kissing them, or watching the smile lines at the corners of his mom’s eyes crinkle as he tells her about his day.

There’s nothing to lose here, he knows. Hunk is a loving person, just like his mom—gentle but firm, always looking out for him when things get too tough.

For a moment, he wonders if that’s the sort of person who Keith is to Shiro.

That thought only makes his stomach hurt more.

To Hunk’s credit, he doesn’t look too shell-shocked by the end of Lance’s winded story. He only gasps a handful of times. He only really shirks away when Lance gets too invested in explaining how Keith’s eyes had bored white-hot holes straight into his chest from between Shiro’s legs in the locker room yesterday.

Hunk sits still for a long moment after he’s done, a hand over his mouth as he allows the hopeless, absolutely ridiculous reality of Lance’s situation to truly sink in. If Lance weren’t waiting with baited breath for his response, horrified that he’d actually bared his darkest secrets to another person without thinking it through first, he might find Hunk’s profoundly lost expression to be a little bit funny.

After a long breath, Hunk wipes his face with his hand. He’s sitting on the floor, leaning against their shared desk and staring forlornly up at the ceiling fan as it makes slow circles above their heads. Their bowls have long-since been stacked safely in the corner, until Hunk can sneak them out and wash them in the bathroom like he always does under the cover of darkness. Lance is sitting cross-legged by now, hugging his bunched up blanket to his chest and watching every one of Hunk’s movements like a hawk.

If he looks disgusted, Lance isn’t sure what he might do, but he wants to know the truth about this. He wants to know if Keith is really out to get him, or if the jealousy that’s become impossible to deny even to himself has completely clouded his mind.

“Well,” Hunk huffs, “Do you want my honest opinion?”

Lance nods quickly, eagerly. The bed squeaks under his weight.

“I think they like you, man. I think…they want you to join them.”

 

* * *

 

Somehow, after hiding out in his dorm room for the remainder of the weekend, Lance finds the strength to pull himself out of bed and trudge to class bright and early Monday morning.

Hunk is already gone by the time that he comes back from the shower. He’d sped off to catch his instructor early in order to ask him about some problem that he’s been having in class. Lance couldn’t find the will to focus on whatever it was when he’d complained about it, but he appreciates having the room to himself nonetheless.

He towels off his hair, checking the clock on the wall to make sure that he won’t have to dress in a hurry. He’s relieved to find that he still has thirty minutes, which is more than enough time to work himself up to actually showing his face when he knows that he shares his first class with…

_Him._

He doesn’t even want to think about that slimy little bastard right now. He doesn’t want to remember that way that his cheeks had flushed pink under the flourescent lights in the locker room the other day, the way that his eyes had sparkled like thousands of fireflies making their way through the thick darkness of night. He doesn’t want to imagine the way that those nimble, overworked fingers might slide up Shiro’s thigh when they’re alone—how those horrible, lying lips might open up and catch a piece of Shiro’s skin between those stupid, pearly teeth.

He hates the way that Keith Kogane is perfect. He hates the way that he doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s better than everyone else. He hates that stupid smile that he makes sometimes when Lance sees him talking with Shiro in the halls, how no one knows how the two of them met. There’s no way to even know for sure how long Keith has been threading this horrible web of lies around him—surely, convincing Shiro that he’s anything but an insufferable horse’s ass. Surely, fooling him into thinking that dating some cocky bastard like Keith Kogane could ever end in anything but heartbreak.

Lance knows that there’s something not quite right about Keith, and he knows that everyone else can feel it too. There’s an air about him—the way that he won’t let anyone ever get too close, the way that he’s a master of everything that he tries the first time that he tries it, the strength that Lance has witnessed from him while they’re toiling away in self defense class—it’s so dreadfully inhuman, so obviously _alien_ that Lance wouldn’t be surprised if someday, he stumbled in on Keith peeling away his human-shaped face mask to reveal the little green man who really lives inside of him.

He shakes his head, shivering slightly as the thought of an alien actually roving the halls of the Garrison succeeds in giving him the creeps. Keith is a weirdo, sure, and he’s the biggest piece of shit that Lance has ever met, but there’s no reason to get himself all worked up over a few idiosyncrasies. He’s sure that Shiro would be smart enough to spot an alien if he ever actually encountered one. He’s sure that the Garrison wouldn’t let someone into the school without knowing who they really were.

He hangs his towel above the radiator to dry, grabbing his clothes from where he’d set them out neatly on his bed and bending over to step into his boxers. He can’t stop himself from thinking about Keith’s laugh the other day—how it had seemed to bubble out so clumsily, how his voice had cracked and his face had flushed even darker, as though he was so unused to reaching that octave that his vocal cords hadn’t known exactly what to do. He’d seemed uncomfortably happy. He’d looked as though he wasn’t really sure how to smile.

Something about that sits wrong with Lance. He can’t describe the feeling that it spreads throughout his chest—the prickles of discomfort, the aching of something deep inside of his heart that he isn’t sure if he’d ever want to put a name to.

He considers how deep Keith’s overdone “bad boy” routine might really go. He imagines him sitting in his dorm room with that sour look on his face, earplugs jammed in his ears with some stupid, melodramatic rock song blaring so loud that his roommate can’t concentrate on studying. He wonders how many embarrassing hairstyles he might have went through as he’d grown up—how many phases he’d passed over before finally settling on “dirt bag without real human compassion”. He likes to think about a Keith with dry, frizzy hair—dyed some ridiculous color at the tips—with black painted fingernails and dark eyeliner, whining about the pains and sorrows of the world that no one their age could really understand.

He wonders if Shiro ever knew a Keith like that. He wonders at which point Keith decided that he would begin pretending that he didn’t feel anything at all.

He doesn’t like thinking about the two of them growing up together, however, so he chooses to imagine something else—like how miserable it must be to be the poor guy who has to share a room with Keith. He’s sure that Keith is messy, that he’s always dragging himself into their room after a fight, getting blood all over everything, breaking their stuff if he gets too angry and can’t control himself.

He wonders how the guy can even handle it. And he wonders if Shiro might have pulled some strings so that Keith could bunk alone instead.

He’s buttoning his shirt a little too roughly at this point. He curses under his breath, throwing himself down onto the bed and dragging his boots toward him. Stupid Keith always keeps his uniform perfectly clean. How does he get the blood stains out? How does he get the… _other_ stains out?

How have he and Shiro managed to keep this shit secret for so long? Are they always pushing the envelope like this? Are they always messing around just out of sight, just waiting for some miserable bastard to stumble in on them?

The laces on his boots are tied extra tight. He grabs his bag from beside the door so roughly that he accidentally slams it into the wall. Stupid fucking Keith, he thinks. What a horrible, deplorable asshole. Always making things hard for him. Always looking down on everyone.

He closes the door behind him and begins stomping to class, hoping that everyone around him can sense the bad mood emanating off of him and leave him alone. Like they do with Keith, he thinks, but that thought only makes him angrier.

He wants nothing more to teach Keith a lesson about respecting his fellow students. He wants nothing more than to show him who’s boss.

What he wouldn’t give to get some time alone with him—to hold him down and wipe that shitty smug smile right off of his stupid pouty lips.

He’d show Keith what kind of man deserves to sleep with someone like Takashi Shirogane. He’d show Keith exactly what makes him the right person for the job. Keith would be just _begging_ him to steal Shiro away by the end of it, he’d be begging and pleading, and maybe when he was especially humiliated and vulnerable, Lance would give him _exactly_ what he wanted so bad.

He slips through the open door into the classroom, wondering idly who turned up the heat so high, so early in the school year. He feels like he’s on fire, like his clothes are clinging to his sweaty skin uncomfortably tight.

And he thinks about what he’d do to Keith to teach him all of these long overdue lessons. He thinks about pinning him down and making him beg, and whimper, and cry.

He thinks about these things without really connecting the dots, until the man himself walks through the door and _grins_ right in his direction—that terrible, blood-boiling grin—and Lance finally realizes exactly what sort of situation he’s been fantasizing about this entire time.

Beneath his desk, he crosses his legs uncomfortably. Keith’s eyes are as hot on his skin as they always feel when he catches sight of him in the halls. Keith’s cocky grin is just as knowing and condescending as it always is in his dreams.

Of course that bastard Keith wouldn’t even let him enjoy one of their two classes together without giving him a fucking boner. It’s all Keith’s fault—this has always been and will always be Keith’s fault. There’s something wrong with him. Keith has poisoned his mind.

He can’t stop thinking about those dark, sparkling eyes, those long stretches of naked, pale skin, the way that his laugh had lit up the empty locker room like music echoing around him, reverberating around in his bones, haunting his dreams and occupying his thoughts so that nothing he does anymore can ever be free of _Keith…Keith…Keith…_

He can’t even jerk off to his guilty private fantasies about Shiro these days without imagining the way that Keith had wrapped around him so perfectly, how he’d made Shiro moan, how he’d known just where to touch him in order to draw out those beautiful noises—and how easy it might be for a prodigy like Keith to find all of those secret little places on himself as well.

He finds himself wondering what would have happened if he’d stayed in the shower when Shiro kissed him, or if he’d walked into the room and joined them the other day when he’d stumbled in. These thoughts keep him up deep in the night, dragging their grubby fingers over his dreams until he awakens in a mess of his own sweat and cum, crying out desperately and wondering, mortified, if Hunk ever hears him.

He’s glaring daggers into the side of Keith’s face when their instructor finally strolls in. He’s telling himself that all of this is a byproduct of a lack of sleep, and too many lewd images being thrown in his face when he already has far too many things to be stressing out about on his own.

He’s finally beginning to calm himself down when their instructor starts his lesson, dimming the lights and turning on the projector overhead. He’s telling himself that this will all pass in time. Hunk is mistaken, Keith has no filthy intentions.

But then he makes the mistake of glancing in Keith’s direction once again, as he’s fetching his notebook from his bag beneath his desk. Those smoldering eyes are watching him blankly, picking apart his actions, judging him silently. Keith’s face is a heavily locked door as always. His eyes are devoid of anything that Lance might use to understand what’s going on in his head. The most frustrating thing about Keith is the way that he can close himself off completely, only feeding through enough of whoever he is deep inside that Lance can never form a perfect picture.

When he looks at Keith—really takes the time to look into his eyes—he sometimes feels like he’s staring into a mirror, as though everything that he hates about himself, everything that he tries to cover up so no one else can see is right there, thrown back at him. As though Keith is just a sheet of glass that he could pass through if he really wanted to, but he could never hope to reach in and pull out anything that might help him understand. He’ll never know why Keith looks at him, or why he’s so afraid to laugh, or why, sometimes, he stares at Shiro as though he’s a wilting, dying thing that won’t be around for very much longer.

He hates that he even wants to know any of this. He hates that such a bland person, devoid of any personality, vacant of any redeeming qualities, has captured his attention at all.

But he stares right back at Keith, feeling as though he’s looking right into the sun.

His breath catches in his throat. The instructor’s voice is buried beneath the blood pumping furiously in his ears.

And gradually, as if in slow motion, Keith grins—wicked, calculating, and absolutely alluring. He’s holding his pencil up in front of him, inches away from his lips. Lance watches as he twirls it about, his eyes flicking from the tip of it to Keith’s smile—from those straight, white teeth hinting through the corners of his mouth to the vibrant pink of the eraser that’s moving closer, closer…

He swallows hard, the sweat growing thicker on the back of his neck chafing uncomfortably against the collar of his shirt. He’s gripping the edges of his desk so hard that his knuckles tremble. He doesn’t even know where his own pencil went—it’s not the one that he cares about right now. He can’t even hear their instructor saying his name.

Keith prods out a pink, wet tongue, dragging it slowly over the end of the pencil. And he winks—winks right at Lance as though any of this is normal, as though any of this is even remotely appropriate behavior when so many people are sitting around them!

His resolve shatters once Keith’s grin breaks out even wider. His dick is so hard that it’s straining painfully against the seam of his pants. The pulsing in his ears rushes further south. His foot collides hard and loud against the leg of his desk.

“Cadet? Are you listening to me? McClain, do you need to see the nurse?”

Lance realizes entirely too late why Keith felt so safe putting on such a perverted show. No one is even looking in his direction. They couldn’t care less about a mullet-headed weirdo deep-throating his pencil when their instructor has been calling Lance’s name this entire time, and he’s—

He’s been staring at Keith, sitting so straight in his seat that surely everyone can see exactly what kinds of things Keith’s done to him. His face flushes darkly. His life is over.

He doesn’t know why he looks at Keith again, one last time, but the face that greets him can only be described as _positively enthralled_.

It’s the last straw.

He can’t handle this.

He swears to himself, no matter what, that he’s tracking that slippery bastard down and finally kicking his ass after class.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for supporting this story! See you next week!


	6. The Persistence of Memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not easy to teach someone how to love.

It was a few days before Keith’s twelfth birthday, and Shiro was almost fifteen, when it first happened.

It was a cold, cold day. Shiro remembers how the ice and snow squished beneath his boots. He remembers how it was overcast, the sky bunched with heavy, snow-laden clouds on the verge of opening over his head at any moment.

Keith was wearing the pair of matching gloves that Shiro’s mother had bought for them. His were red, Shiro’s were black. He would never wear the hat, though, his hair long enough these days that it covered his ears and neck well. He complained to Shiro that it made his head feel too hot, but he had thanked his mother for her kindness, all the same.

“Jesus,” Shiro said when he stopped at the gates, surprised to see Keith playing out in the yard on his way back from school that day. The yard was barren, except for his small, bundled up figure. He was the only one braving the plummeting temperature, it appeared.

And for good reason — it couldn’t have been more than 15 degrees out. Shiro himself had been warned by his mother to wear his long johns because the wind chill factor was going to be dangerously low.

“Keith, what are you doing out here?! It’s freezing!”

“Technically, it’s below freezing. I think it’s about -5 degrees celsius. But I run warm,” Keith shrugged, balling snow between his gloved palms. He’d complained about that embarrassing looking, puffy jacket his mother had also insisted he take, too, but he was at least opting to wear it now.

There was a halfhearted attempt at a snowman near his feet, a lopsided, sad looking thing that he ripped off some of his jacket buttons for in order to fashion creepy-looking eyes on its decrepit little face.

Keith suddenly kicked the thing, and the snow exploded towards Shiro through the bars. While stomping down its remains, he spat, “The other kids are pussies and whiners! It’s just a little frozen water. Bunch of babies.”

Shiro wrapped his arms around himself, rubbing rapidly up and down to warm them up as he stood still, trying to keep his blood hot enough while he wasn’t moving. “Well, _I’m_ cold.”

“You’re a wimp, though,” Keith grinned, and with a lighting quick flick of his wrist, he launched a snowball at him. “It’s to be expected.”

That first snowball hit him square in the chest, and Shiro yelped, because he always forgot just how _strong_ Keith could be sometimes.

“You’re going to catch a cold,” Shiro warned, but he smiled back, and let his backpack hit the ground. If Keith wanted a fight, well. Then who was he to deny him?

In any case, he could never say no to Keith.

Keith snorted. “Whatever, mom.”

They laughed and cheered, gave loud war cries as they both zipped into action, packing snowballs and throwing them aimlessly. Shiro managed to hit Keith in the head at one point, and snow exploded into his hair. Keith’s eyes flashed dangerously, and he’d tossed one right back that struck Shiro so hard in the neck he was sure it was going to leave a red mark even through the cushion of his scarf.

By the end of it, they were breathless and smiling like idiots, clouds of their breath puffing out visibly into the air. Keith had tumbled back to avoid getting hit more, and was working on a shoddy shield of a snow bank to fully hide behind. Shiro paused mid-throw of his last bit of artillery, a massive snow and ice chunk mix. A truly lethal weapon for his final blow.

Shiro couldn’t help but stare at Keith instead, the sharp air stabbing tight into his lungs from his open mouth. Keith’s face looked really pretty like that, with flakes of melting snow resting in his hair. Even without the sun shining down on him, he seemed to glow. His cheeks and nose were reddened from the sting of the wind, his smile wide. There was that usual, devious glint in his violet irises as he giggled a strange, hiccuping kind of laugh. Crystals of ice were finely edged into his eyelashes.

It was sort of cute.

Keith had looked at him curiously from behind a mound of snow when he didn’t launch his projectile. Sitting up on his knees, he watched as Shiro stupidly couldn’t even let his arm down. He was still holding it up.

“Takashi?” Keith pulled him back, carefully, his smile fading as his brows drew together with concern.

Shiro snapped out of whatever that was. He finally lowered his arm, and shook his head of the weird thoughts in his mind.

Keith was his friend. He wasn’t supposed to think his friends were cute like that...was he?

Hopping to his feet, Keith dusted snow off his soaked jacket. “You alright?” he asked, tilting his head as he approached the bars. “You look a little funny.”

“Uh, yeah,” Shiro coughed, letting the wad of crumbling snow fall to the ground from limp fingers, “I was just, um...thinking about what I was gonna get you for your birthday!”

“In the middle of a snowball fight?” Keith asked, sounding confused as he scrunched his nose up. Shiro wanted to sink into the ground in shame.

Shiro scratched the top of his head and looked away sheepishly. “Y-yeah! Just...been on my mind lately. My mom wanted to know what you want so we could pick something out for you.”

“Huh,” Keith said, cupping a hand to his chin as he pondered the question. Shiro breathed a sigh of relief that he accepted the answer and was distracted enough by it to not further pry. “What would I want?”   

Shiro had never even known when his tenth birthday had been, until after it had passed and Keith mentioned one day that he was ten, even though he originally said he was nine when they met. After some careful prodding, Shiro was able to draw the date out from him by saying he could guess around when it probably was anyway. The year after that, Keith had gone through a weird period where he’d grown even more sullen and withdrawn, and wouldn’t verbally say anything for a few weeks. He refused all of the gifts Shiro and his family tried to give him.

Shiro genuinely did want to do something special for him this year. It would be the first birthday they could properly celebrate for him. Keith had been doing a lot better since the orphanage was being forced to instate stricter regulations over the past year, which Shiro was beginning to suspect at the back of his mind, probably had a lot more to do with his mother than she was letting on.

Keith looked thoughtfully up at the sky. Shiro found, again, his eyes drawn to his face, to the rounded curves that were beginning to even into more abrupt, defined lines as he neared puberty.

When Keith looked back down and straight at him, Shiro remembers how that felt like the first instance his heart began racing from thereon out every time Keith flashed him that cheeky grin.

“Come back in a few days, and maybe I’ll tell you.”

 

* * *

 

When Shiro returned to the orphanage a few days later, he brought a physical present along with him, just in case. His mother had pushed for him to do it, no matter how adamant Keith always seemed to be that he didn’t want anything. 

_ “Everyone wants something,”  _ his mom had told him, _ “even if he didn’t tell you specifically, there must be something that you think he’d like.” _

And there were a lot of things that he could think of, but nothing that would have rested quite as comfortably in his hands as the gift that they’d eventually decided on. 

The iron bars greeted him as he grew nearer and nearer to the building—silent and oppressive as always, chipped even further away by the sleet and the snow, with long, spearheaded icicles dripping down between the gaps. 

He’d expected to find Keith waiting for him, as he nearly always was. He wouldn’t understand for a very long time that it wasn’t fate that brought them together every time that he visited. It wasn’t a coincidence. But it was something about Keith—about the otherworldly senses that he had about these things. About when Shiro might pop in to say hello, when would be the best time to run and hide, or fight. 

But Keith wasn’t waiting for him when he got close enough to the gate to peer through into the courtyard. For a few moments, Shiro had wondered nervously if maybe he was hiding somewhere inside.

It just wasn’t like Keith, so he kept looking. He poked his head through the bars, pressing a gloved hand against them to steady himself, and nearly jumping back in surprise as the gate lurched inward with a grating screech of rusty, half-frozen metal. 

Someone had forgotten to lock it. And Keith was still nowhere to be found. 

His mother had always told him not to trespass on other people’s property, but maybe she would understand, in this instance. 

If it was for Keith, maybe it was more important. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal or a bad thing, if he was just looking for his friend. 

Regardless of his inner turmoil, he tiptoed inside, struggling to bury his fear and guilt deep inside of himself. It was quiet in the courtyard, save for his own sloshed footsteps through dirty, gray snow. Despite the chatter of children’s voices, just far enough off in the distance that he couldn’t make out what they were saying. 

He followed those voices, hoping, at the very least, that they would have some idea where Keith was hiding. He could feel the dread already beginning to fester inside of him, wrapping cold fingers around his heart, until he felt just as frozen on the inside as his face felt in the chilly winter air.

He trudged forward, swallowing that fear, biting down all of the reservations that he still had about stepping foot inside of the orphanage without being trapped there forever. 

He felt silly, and small. He wondered then, as he rounded the corner of the building, why he could never be as brave as someone like Keith. 

The trees were bare, black skeletons, looming high above him—reaching clawed fingers up into the empty, gray sky. The snow beneath his feet was so trampled and destroyed that it was nothing but frothy, dirty slush. It seemed as though someone had passed through there recently—and he hoped, despite the worry growing only larger in his heart, that it might have been anyone who would know where to direct him to Keith. 

But around the corner, he realized that he wouldn’t have to ask. He didn’t have time to worry, to figure out what he might say, how he might explain away why he was looking for the kid who it seemed that no one ever paid attention to. 

Because just as his boots slipped in the ice embedded under the snow, just as he reached up to brace himself on the slick, filthy brick wall corner, he spotted Keith. 

Not hiding out alone. Not sitting somewhere inside, to protect himself from the cold. 

He was standing some ways away, in a spot on the concrete that had been cleared of ice and snow. In the center of a big number “4” on a hopscotch path, his tiny fists held up defensively in front of him. 

He was surrounded by three or four other boys, each easily twice his size. They were laughing, circling him slowly. But even then, he didn’t look afraid. He was shaking and red-faced, small and frail and waifish in the abrasive cold. 

Livid, maybe. Fluffing himself up to look bigger and stronger and meaner, but not scared. 

Shiro didn’t understand him, even then. He didn’t understand how a kid so small could face off against so many boys, so much bigger than him, and not feel any fear at all. 

For a moment, Shiro felt rooted to the ground. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t think. He could only watch as those boys laughed, as they jerked forward as though to psych Keith out—as though to make him flinch and call his bluff of bravery. But Keith didn’t move an inch, just like Shiro. He didn’t make a move to fight back, didn’t lash out or yell. He just watched them, as though waiting. 

As though he was still trying to figure out what kind of reaction he was supposed to give them. 

It wasn’t until one of the boys finally made a real attempt to hurt Keith that Shiro found that he could move again. One of the bigger boys stepped forward, closer to Keith than his friends had dared to come. He’d pushed Keith backward, just hard enough that he’d struggled to maintain his footing, and he’d laughed nervously—as though he wasn’t so sure what Keith was going to do either. 

Shiro wasn’t entirely sure what had come over him, and years from then, he would think back to this moment and consider that maybe, he hadn’t done the right thing. 

Those boys were the same as Keith, somewhat. They were lonely. They were afraid. And Keith might not have deserved any of it, but he was different. He was smaller, an easy target. He was strange in ways that Shiro would still have trouble understanding for many, many years. 

But he’d seen red, when that boy shoved Keith. He’d felt, in that moment, unbridled by his mother’s ever-present lectures in the back of his head, or his own fears of getting hurt. He’d wanted those boys to understand that Keith wasn’t going to get pushed around anymore. He wasn’t going to step back and allow that to happen. 

So he’d dropped Keith’s present and his backpack behind him in the snow. He’d moved forward mechanically, but faster than he’d ever moved in his life. He’d felt then, like he was floating in a dream. As though he existed just outside of himself as he neared the group of them—towering over all of them in a way that would make him feel even guiltier later on. 

He’d said something—yelled it shrilly. Keith had been so surprised by his anger too, that he’d finally flinched away. 

Shiro had grabbed that boy then, and he’d shoved him back. He’d pulled back a sloppy fist, and he’d punched it clumsily—two, three, four times—against the boy’s face.

He was a wild animal. He was an uncontrollable tidal wave of emotions that he’d always been too afraid to feel. 

But Keith didn’t deserve this, any of this. He didn’t deserve this place, these horrible children. The negligent caretakers, the terrible, gnarled black bars that held him in. 

He was yelling incoherently, he was stiff and big and loud as Keith peeled him off of the boy. He barely registered it as Keith dragged him away, leaving the others watching, terrified, behind them. As his bloody-faced victim fell down to the snow, wiping the mess from his nose, crying silently and angrily, calling him names that all sloshed together with the blood pounding in his ears. 

Shiro was shaking and his mind was running a hundred miles per minute. But Keith’s little hands were warm against his arm, tethering him to the rest of the world—grounding him there, after he finally began to calm down. 

Keith’s hand slipped into his palm, and he continued to lead him forward. Through the ugly black gates, over the cracked and slippery sidewalk. Through the winding streets and the picturesque neighborhoods, until they finally reached their small reprieve—the lake close by, untouched by human hands, frozen over and so pristine and silent that he felt guilty disturbing it. 

“That was amazing,” Keith said quietly, his voice barely there at all, “you were like a superhero or something.”

Shiro felt the dam buried deep inside of his chest building stronger and stronger, refusing to break. He’d only hit another person once in his life before—Ryou, when they were kids and they’d been fighting over something so mundane that he couldn’t even remember it anymore—and he’d cried and cried when Ryou had been knocked back in surprise, stumbling on uneven feet and tumbling back onto his butt on their kitchen floor.

Ryou had laughed at him then, old enough that his little brother pushing him wasn’t enough to rattle him anymore. Shiro had been so inconsolable that it had taken his mother twenty minutes to believe them when Ryou had desperately tried to convince her that Shiro had been the one who had hit him.

He didn’t want Keith to know that he was afraid. He didn’t want Keith to think that he was so weak. And he felt a swell of pride growing only larger in his chest the longer that he kept the nervous tears at bay, telling himself that it made no sense for a fourteen year old to be so sensitive anyway.

He remembered overhearing Ryou talking to his mom one night, a few months after he’d met Keith, when he’d accidentally slipped up and said one of the many colorful words that Keith had taught him at the dinner table and his mom had sent him to his room with only half of his dinner finished. She hadn’t talked to him again that night until she’d lead him into the bathroom to wash his mouth out with soap.

He’d tried sneaking into the kitchen for a glass of water to wash away the last traces of suds on his tongue. He’d stopped at the end of the hall when he’d heard their voices—Ryou laughing under his breath, and his mother snapping at him in hurried, indignant whispers.

_ “At least this orphan kid might actually help him become a man, ma.” _

_ “If this is the kind of behavior that you expect from a man, then maybe you should change your definition of ‘manly’! Takashi is already becoming a man! He doesn’t have to be crude to become one! He’s perfect just the way that he is.” _

Shiro had wondered then if he could become a comfortable mixture of both—if he could be tough enough to hold Keith’s attention, but sensitive enough to earn his mother’s respect and adoration. He was still growing bigger and bigger—nearly 5’10” at this point and heavier every day. His chest was growing wider and more defined, so big by now that his mother had to make an emergency trip to the local Goodwill two weeks before they’d flown back to New York for Christmas with his grandparents just to find him a sweater that would fit around his shoulders without leaving an obvious stretch of exposed midriff just above his pant-line.

As he found a comfortable spot beside the pond, it was hard not to notice the difference in their sizes. Keith wouldn’t hit his pique until he was seventeen years old. He wouldn’t fill out until long after he enlisted at the Garrison and began eating regular meals and learning how to exercise and defend himself. His waist was still cinched just above his jagged hip bones—hollowed out and unusually flat below a cage of protruding ribs. His arms were muscled subtly, but there was a thinness to them, like a bird’s legs—but Shiro knew better than to think that he was anything close to vulnerable or weak.

Puberty was beginning to sink in the edges of his cheeks, making him appear more gaunt than Shiro could ever remember him being. There were dark circles beneath his eyes that would never go away entirely—even years later when all of this felt like nothing but a distant memory.

He was staring at Keith for so long that he didn’t even notice him looking back, didn’t make the connection that those dark, hooded eyes turning to stare right through him probably meant that Keith was wondering what in the world was going on.

“Takashi?” He’d asked, raising a brow. His eyebrows were growing in thicker, arching at the tips, adding a breathtaking depth to his face that Shiro couldn’t stop himself from admiring from afar. Sometimes, to Shiro, he looked like the models in all of his mom’s old clothing magazines, the ones who walked up and down runways in bizarre outfits, so emotionless and so detached from the cheering crowds around them that they seemed entirely untouchable.

Keith was becoming even more beautiful, and Shiro felt like he, himself, was growing into a large, unsightly weed. He was nearly a head taller than anyone else in his classes. His hands were far too big and clumsy to do anything that Keith could do with graceful ease.

He cleared his throat, cheeks hot against the cold winter air as he finally looked away from Keith’s perturbed face and regained his composure.

With shaking hands, he shoved the gift toward Keith, not quite looking him in the eye. The paper was tattered and wet from falling to the ground. His filthy hands had smudged blood over the leftover Christmas trees and smiling reindeer scattered about the print.

“I actually...this was the present I bought for you last year, with my saved up piggy bank money, but uh…” Shiro scratched his head. He didn’t know how to finish that sentence without alluding to Keith’s weird behavior at that time, so he let it hang in the air.

His breath was coming out in tiny clouds, blurring the edges of Keith’s face and the small shudder of emotion that he could see dancing around in his eyes. With Keith, Shiro knew by now, it was all in the subtleties. It was no use trying to force him to come out and talk about how he felt, because the time to learn those things had come and gone.

He’d learned about childhood attachment in his rudimentary psychology class freshman year. It was an elective course that his mother had pushed him to take, gently but firmly, pestering him about how useful it would be to be able to read people and understand them deeper until he’d finally relented and agreed to put it on his schedule.

He remembered going over all of it in one single lesson. The stories of wild children who were never shown love or affection by an adult, the tales of kids growing up without meaningful relationships in orphanages—never learning to form deeper bonds with other people, which would stunt them emotionally and hinder their relationships for the rest of their lives.

_ “It’s not easy to teach someone how to love,” _ his teacher had told the class, flipping slowly through different slides on the projector with just enough pause to allow them to sloppily jot down their notes,  _ “Once that window closes, a person might go their entire life without understanding how to pick up on important cues. They can love someone, but they won’t know how to express it. They’ll appear to be emotionless and aloof. Other people might misinterpret their actions as cold or uncaring. The plasticity of a child’s brain is a remarkable thing, but once that time period has passed, there is very little that we can do to change things.” _

But you can love a person who doesn’t understand how to love, his teacher had said later on. You can love them enough that someday they might understand it. It will never be a normal love. It might never develop into anything that other people will be able to wrap their heads around.

Shiro had thought, at the time, that he wouldn’t mind that at all. Keith was so different than anyone who he’d ever met before. He was so much better, so much  _ more _ . It didn’t matter if sometimes he pulled away and tucked himself deep inside of a few layers of distance and mistrust—Shiro would always be there to welcome him back when he was ready.

He would always be there to help him up when he fell down.

Keith was picking at the torn edges of the paper, seeming as though he didn’t entirely understand what he was supposed to do with it. It wasn’t an alien object to him, Shiro was sure. He’d seen a lot of things on television and read about them in books. He knew enough about the world outside of the orphanage that he wasn’t truly surprised by anything that Shiro introduced him to, even if it initially confused him.

But he was perplexed, Shiro could tell, and maybe even a little overwhelmed by the entire situation. Shiro waited until his shoulders slumped and the tenseness of his body smoothed out. He waited until the storm behind his eyes calmed down and his fingers didn’t pick at the edges of the paper with quite as much anxiety.

When Keith finally calmed down, Shiro told him gently that he should open it—”You’ll like it,” he said softly, “It’s yours and you can keep it. You can do anything with it that you want.”

Keith ripped away a long sliver of the paper, snapping the ribbons at the edges despite Shiro trying to show him how to ease them over the sides. There was an excited energy popping in the air then, an exhilaration that he hadn’t felt since the Christmases of his childhood. He thought of the big charity vans that would pull around the back of the orphanage near the end of December. He wondered what Christmas was like behind those tall, black wrought iron bars.

He wondered if Keith had ever celebrated the holidays with the father whom he seldom talked about—the one who had went away and never come back for him, the one who hadn’t said a word before putting him to bed on their lumpy living room couch, before slipping quietly outside into the wilderness in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again.

Shiro had scoured the internet for missing persons listings and body discoveries around the time that Keith had told him. He only had the surname‘Kogane’ to go by, and he’d sat up on their useless, clunky old computer all night, waiting for the dialup to slowly load each page. No one had filed a report for a man with the last name Kogane. No one had discovered a body anywhere near where he’d disappeared.

A string of nervousness and fear had been struck deep inside of Shiro’s heart. Even months later, he could still feel it resonating inside of him, humming a low, aching tune, telling him that there was something so dreadfully wrong about the entire situation that he could never quite put his finger on.

He chased away those troubling thoughts, watching as Keith popped the tape away from the side of the box and flipped the top. He stared at the item inside for a long stretch of time, the cogs turning in his brain as he set the box in his lap and reached inside to run his gloved fingers over the glossy cover of a brand new book.

“It’s written by the same company as your other one,” Shiro told him, “But it’s updated. All of the newer models are in there too.”

For a moment, Keith’s eyes appeared to be particularly glossy in the fog of their shared breath and the dulled grays and whites of the snowy world around them. The sun was overcast—hiding somewhere far behind the dark rainclouds, and Shiro wondered if the tears would sparkle along the corners of his eyelids if there happened to be more light.

His nose was pinker than it had been moments before. He swallowed thickly before clearing his throat and turning those dewy eyes up at Shiro.

“It’s cool,” he said, and his voice wavered. He sounded like a twelve year old who loved his birthday present. He sounded like a kid who had never hidden himself behind layers and layers of protective numbness.

Shiro had smiled then, wide and unabashed. He’d felt his heart thrumming excitedly inside of his chest.

Keith would carry that book with him for years after that day. When Shiro helped him unpack his things once he moved into the Garrison, he would find it in one of the boxes, wrapped up in so many layers of newspaper that it could have probably survived a nuclear war.

“Are you going to give me my other present too?” Keith asked, and when Shiro looked at him in confusion, he added, “The one that I told you to come back for.”

Shiro hesitated for a moment before nodding. He wasn’t sure what to expect. He hadn’t brought any money with him and hadn’t brought any food. He’d been so focused on giving Keith his present that he’d simply run home and grabbed it off of the kitchen counter, sprinting all the way back to the orphanage before Ryou could even finish telling him to be careful and come home before it got dark.

“Yeah, uh…whatever you want, buddy,” he said dumbly, knitting his brows and wringing his hands together anxiously.

Keith watched him for a moment then, closing the lid on the box and setting it back on top of Shiro’s backpack. His expression gave nothing away, but Shiro had known him for entirely too long to be surprised anymore. He could see the wetness fading away from his eyes, but there was a pinkness on his cheeks that he couldn’t explain away with the mere cold. He hadn’t seemed winded even as they were rushing away from the orphanage. He never reacted to the cold or the heat quite like anyone else who Shiro had ever met before.

“Close your eyes,” Keith told him, his voice holding an authority that awakened something heavy and confusing in the pits of Shiro’s belly. He would look back on this moment as an adult and laugh at his own naivety.

There were many thoughts flooding through his brain in that moment, as he closed his eyes for Keith. He wondered if Keith was going to punch him, swore to himself that it was the only reasonable way that a situation like this could end. He didn’t understand why Keith would want to, but frankly, he rarely understood Keith’s motives at all anyway, and he’d given up trying a long time ago.

He braced himself for the pain, ignoring the twinge of hurt feelings and the questions that only continued to pop up in the back of his mind. Had he been a bad friend? Had he overstepped a boundary? Did Keith just not like him as much as he’d thought, or did he get some kind of thrill out of hurting a person who was willing to do anything for him?

At least the kids at school would admire a black eye. He could tell them that he’d gotten it in a fight. It wouldn’t be a complete lie. He wouldn’t have to tell them that the kid who punched him was twelve and only 5’2”. They wouldn’t have to know that he’d willingly made himself vulnerable just because a pretty boy had asked him to.

There was a small stretch of quiet, a moment in which his heartbeat and Keith’s erratic breathing were the only things that he could hear. He could feel the wet cold of the melted snow beneath him seeping up into the legs and seat of his pants. He shivered even in his thick coat and extra layer of long johns. He waited with baited breath for whatever Keith threw his way.

And finally, after what felt like an eternity of panic, he felt the lightest, warmest sensation of softness against his lips. He felt the gust of hot breath on the bridge of his nose and his cheeks. Keith’s body radiated heat. He could feel both of their fitful heartbeats pounding in the small sliver of empty air between them.

The world blurred and tipped sideways. His head swam and the numbness slowly sinking into his skin melted away. He didn’t open his eyes until he felt Keith pull back, until he could hear rapid footsteps stomping through the snow and disappearing somewhere in the distance behind him.

The fuzzy blackness faded slowly from his vision. He was alone looking over a frozen pond, as the sun set behind the clouds and the sky melted from dull gray to deep, empty, dark blue. It looked just like Keith’s eyes. The night was a comforting blanket, devoid of the chill that he should have felt. Instead, he felt only contented, intoxicated, completely, overwhelmingly whole .

The book and the box were both gone, but the wrapping paper was scattered messily in the snow.

It took a long time for the frayed wires in his brain to connect and stop fizzling uselessly. He was trembling and soaked in the cold and the snow before he realized exactly what Keith had taken from him before running away.

He didn’t tell Ryou what had happened when he finally trudged through the door that night. He’d shed his clothes and taken a shower, pulled on his pajamas and tucked himself into bed.

He was on the cusp of fifteen when Keith had stolen his first kiss.

There were no fireworks or bursting stars behind his eyes like they’d always spoken of in books and movies. He didn’t feel like the earth was moving around him. He didn’t feel like anything had shifted profoundly, or as though anything had really changed at all.

It had been the most gentle thing that Keith had ever done for him. It had felt the same way as pressing his fingers softly against his own lips. It was a quiet, nervous sensation—a slow-moving thing that had paused time for only a moment, long enough for his thoughts to clog up in the back of his brain until it had taken him until the next morning to truly feel up to speed.

The world didn’t stop turning and the people around him weren’t any different than before, but something inside of Shiro felt changed from that moment on. It was as though Keith kissing him had forced everything into perspective, as though he finally realized what was important, what he wanted, and the sorts of things that he would need to reach in and pull out of life, if he ever wanted to die without any regrets.

It was then when Shiro decided that he wanted to enlist at the Galaxy Garrison. He’d seen the ads posted proudly on the walls all over school. He’d heard the townsfolk talking about distant nieces and nephews who had joined, puffing out their chests proudly as their friends congratulated them in awe.

It was then when he realized that he wanted to become something that he could be proud of. He wanted to make his mark on the world. He wanted to be the kind of person who could pull Keith out of the dingy orphanage, who could support him and love him until he truly understood what it meant to be precious to another person.

It was then that he’d set his sights on a singular goal—when he’d sealed his inevitable fate and taken the first steps that would lead him down a long, harrowing path to becoming something so important and so valuable to the universe that he couldn’t possibly comprehend it at the time.

And it was then, he knows now, when he’d finally realized that his life would forever revolve around Keith Kogane—that he would always chase him and be chased by him, and that he would never, ever be able to let him go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!


	7. Close Encounters of the Keith Kind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Do whatever you want to me, Lance,” Shiro breathes, “But please… touch me.”

Lance, for once, is thankful that Keith’s hideous mullet is hard to lose in a crowd.

It hadn’t been easy to wait for the bastard to leave class before following him. He’d taken his sweet-ass time collecting his things, staring blankly out of the window for an amount of time that Lance considers to be excessively, _ purposefully _ long, before finally taking his things one by one and slipping them inside of his tattered backpack. He’d stopped to talk to their instructor on the way out—something about extra credit that had made Lance’s blood boil as he’d thought bitterly,  _ ‘Oh, is that perfect 4.0 not good enough for you, asshole?’ _ —before finally, after pretending that he didn’t notice Lance lingering just outside of the door, saluting their instructor stiffly and making his way out into the hall.

He hadn’t moved particularly fast even then, but with all of their fellow students piling out of their respective classrooms and lazing about in the halls, it had been difficult to push through the throngs of people while keeping a safe distance between them and not bringing too much attention to himself.

He hadn’t thought too much about it when Keith had taken a turn down the wrong hall. He might have been finding another instructor whose ass he could kiss. He might have been looking for Shiro. Only the higher-ranking students had their classes down these halls, and Lance had forced himself not to get distracted by the particular kind of anger that Keith sneaking off surely to play house with Shiro—instead of actually going to his stupid advanced classes—generally inspired.

He only begins to get worried when Keith takes yet another unusual turn. There’s no one this far down the hall—far beyond the higher ranking officers’ lockers, past the instructor’s lounge, all the way down a winding flight of stairs that Lance knows is prohibited to everyone in their rank, regardless of how much ass they kiss or how “talented” they might be.

He’s following Keith with more distance between them now, hiding in the shadows the best that he can, ducking desperately behind every trash can and open door that pops up along his way. He remembers this area from the Galaxy Garrison brochure. He remembers pointing at the glossy photographs on the page, bragging to his younger siblings and friends, and anyone who was willing to listen, that he’d be boarding a ship and taking off on a prestigious space travel mission from here someday.

Keith takes another sharp turn. His footsteps echo against the tall, empty walls as he draws closer and closer to the Garrison’s biggest hangar. Lance knows that they keep the practice ships in here. He also knows that not even Keith has managed to log enough hours on the simulator to earn the right to come down here.

He chalks it up as a conspiracy. He wonders if he should have brought a camera to collect evidence.

But it’s perfect, he thinks, grinning wide and mad and as predatory as he can manage through his nervousness, outrage, and fear. If he beats Keith to a bloody pulp in a place like this, who can he tell? How can he possibly hope to rat Lance out when he definitely isn’t cleared to be anywhere near this place, especially without the supervision of a senior officer?

There’s a dark, creepy  _ wetness _ about these halls. They’re so far down that Lance can’t hear a single thing sans Keith’s even footfalls and water dripping somewhere in the walls. His pulse spikes, anxiety crawling over his skin. This is the kind of chilly seclusion that he’s never been able to get used to. He’s accustomed to the feeling of another person constantly within arms reach—the sound of his mom laughing or singing or bickering with his aunts on the phone in the other room. The sensation of an entire school sleeping and eating and _ existing _ close enough that he never truly feels alone.

But it’s frigid down here, and so far away from anyone who could possibly hear him. He’s suddenly entirely too aware of how abnormal Keith is. He thinks about those mirror-like eyes. He thinks about the way that he sometimes stares too hard and too long at nothing in particular—his expression void of any decipherable emotion, as though he’s waiting for something real and something human to find its way inside of him and finally bring him to life.

He thinks about the way that Keith had operated the simulator as though he was born to return someday to the sky—as though he found a familiarity in the deep, cold recesses of space that he could never find in the presence of anyone else here on Earth.

He thinks about the way that Keith talks to no one but Shiro, and sometimes—very rarely—Lance himself. He doesn’t understand a person who doesn’t ache for human contact in the same way that he does. Keith keeps the world far beyond arm’s length. He does his work in class and disappears from sight until the next day. Lance has never heard anything about him that wasn’t an unproven rumor. He barely hears anyone talk about him at all anymore.

It’s as though Keith is nothing more than a ghost haunting these halls—always dangling his accomplishments just above Lance’s fingertips. As though he is nothing but the embodiment of everything that Lance will never be good enough to reach.

When he thinks about it, he doesn’t really know anything about Keith at all.

Lance thinks that Keith might be the most unsettling person who he’s ever had the displeasure of meeting. He wonders if Keith is sneaking down here to finally shed his human skin.

He almost becomes so spooked that he turns back and gives up. He almost chooses flight over fight in a situation where finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time with a terribly, terribly  _ wrong  _ person might mean the end of his life.

He’s already turning around to scamper back with his tail between his legs when he hears a door open and close so close that he nearly screeches in terror. He’s ducked behind a row of lockers in order to have his moment of weakness—telling himself that being found out when he’s showing vulnerability would be nothing short of a death sentence. He can already imagine the horrific bulbous eyes of the alien beneath Keith’s human mask. He’s already envisioning those long, tentacle-like fingers reaching for him, probing him, wrapping around his wrists and pinning him down. This alien Keith would show him no mercy. His slimy appendages would slide up under his clothing, searching out his body for weakness, filling every available orifice.

He’d be powerless to stop Keith then. He’d be stuck down here, entirely alone, bound up and used until he could answer to no master but whichever extraterrestrial race that Keith hails from.

He curses under his breath. His body has never been very good at knowing the proper time to react to certain _ thoughts.  _ He isn’t sure when the line between terror and arousal became so blurry, or when he started finding this whole “maybe Keith’s an alien” thing more hot than the stuff of nightmares, but he tells himself that he’ll add a few punches to Keith’s inevitable ass-kicking to make up for it when the time comes.

As it is, his curiosity won’t let him leave.

He has to know where Keith’s sneaking off to this early in the day.

He swallows hard, bunching his uniform in his fist, right above his swiftly-pounding heart. Be it an alien transformation, a conspiracy, or something else that he can only imagine in terror, Lance tells himself that he’s come too far to turn back now. He has to get to the bottom of this, or he’ll never be able to forgive himself for letting this opportunity pass him by.

With this thought in mind, he pushes himself off of the lockers, stumbling into the middle of the hall. Determination mingles with the confusing mixture of emotions already rushing through his brain. He feels lightheaded and overwhelmed, strung-out and exhausted. He feels an overwhelming need for restitution, to give Keith back all of the pain and suffering that he’s endured tenfold. He wants to make him understand that none of this is funny anymore—that it was never funny in the first place. That he can’t just toy around with another man’s libido without facing the consequences.

He shakes his head wildly, letting out a breathy, aggravated growl as he smacks his cheeks with each hand. He’s getting off-topic again. He needs to kick Keith’s ass, and nothing else. He doesn’t need to take him up on his disgusting offers. He doesn’t need to make any of his terrible wet dreams come to life.

He needs to settle this like a man—with his fist in Keith’s face, with his foot right up Keith’s firm, shapely ass. With himself standing over Keith’s crumpled body, laughing boastfully as Keith cries his sad, pretty-boy tears.  

Even if it doesn’t solve anything, at the very least, maybe it will make him feel better.

There are three doors ahead of him until the hall comes to an end. He just has to try the handles and hope that Keith left one unlocked.

The first door yields nothing, but he tells himself that Keith surely wouldn’t lock himself inside. He knows that keycards are needed to get in and out of all of these rooms. One of these doors has to be it. He’s only getting closer to figuring out which one.

The second door that he reaches is still ajar. He can see lights flickering through the narrow crack. He draws in a deep, shuddering breath, swallowing down his anxiety, fighting back the urge to run away and hide in a cocoon of blankets in his room until he forgets that he ever even tried this.

He can do this.

He can be brave.

He’ll uncover this once and for all. He’ll find out exactly what kind of person Keith Kogane really is.

And in the end, when he uncovers Keith’s dirty secret and exposes him for everyone to see, maybe Shiro will realize just how horrible he is once and for all.

 

* * *

 

Shiro steps into the hull of the ship, smile quirking up his lips when he spots Keith lounging in the cockpit chair. With his back to him, Keith has his hands on the stick and controls, apparently caught up in imagining what it might be like to take off right there. It reminds Shiro of a time when they were younger, when they used to pretend the trees were jets and Keith would whip a branch back to take him up to the clouds.

He smiles wider, nostalgically, and watches him move the levers around for a few more moments before he coughs into his hand.

“Lance followed you again, didn’t he?” He asks quietly, peering through the windshield and squinting at the shadowy figure striding across the empty, dark room. Keith jumps a little, and it’s then that Shiro realizes he must have been so immersed in his fantasy he didn’t even hear him come in.

“Sorry, I thought you knew I was here,” Shiro says apologetically, moving closer and laying his hand on Keith’s shoulder. Keith looks up at him with a scowl, but doesn’t say anything biting about it.

“Yeah, he thinks he’s being discreet,” he snorts, turning back to watch as Lance dips and dives between the other ships, as if they don’t already know he’s there, “But I noticed him the second we got out of class. Idiot’s been doing that whole ‘ _ 007 _ ’ act for the past ten minutes. It’s been hard to watch.”

Shiro knows better than to ask, but he does it anyway. “Keith,” he sighs, running a tired hand through his hair, “What did you do?”

Keith is grinning now, one hand curling around Shiro’s waist to pull him closer, and more in front of him. “I didn’t do anything,” he says, mischievously glinting eyes extremely unconvincing. “Why do you always think I’m up to no good?”

Seating himself across Keith’s spread thighs, Shiro laces his hands around his neck. “With that look on your face, am I really supposed to assume you aren’t?”

Laughing, Keith tugs him down by the collar of his uniform.

“It’s not nice to be suspicious of your own boyfriend,” he shrugs, putting one palm on either side of Shiro’s hips. He digs his fingernails in tight. Shiro can feel an eager erection already pushing up against him.

Whatever happened between them, clearly has Keith riled up enough that Shiro is a bit disheartened not knowing what depraved things must have gone on in their shared class.

Oh well. He’s sure he’ll find out soon enough.

Shiro presses a grin to those devious lips, and they move across each other leisurely, as if Lance isn’t just a few feet away and can probably see them through the windshield. He’s just starting to get into it, sliding his tongue with fervor between Keith’s parting lips, when there’s a series of deafening bangs on the metal door.

“Mullet!” Lance screams from the other side, knowing nothing of the subtleties of sneaking around a place none of them except Shiro could possibly get away with being caught in without being expelled, “I know you’re in there, you greasy, slimy bastard! Open up and show yourself, asshole! I’m going to kick your ass!!”

“Wow, he’s really worked up,” Shiro raises his brows when he pulls away, wondering about all the things Keith could have done to get Lance to this point. “You must have really done a number on him this time…”

Keith rolls his eyes as he gently pushes him, and Shiro reluctantly backs up off of him. Keith salutes him when he stands, and Shiro feels heat further rise into his cheeks. “I’m sure you can find a way to punish me for it later,  _ sir _ .”

Shiro wishes he hadn’t been so busy preparing the consent paperwork for Kerberos last night. It’s been awhile since they’ve been able to meet up like this. He shuffles his feet, adjusting the bulge in his pants to try and get some relief.

At first, Keith strides slowly over to the door, but Lance’s voice is only rising in volume the more he takes his time. Shiro winces at the sound, looking around nervously towards the entrance to the hull. Picking up speed, Keith throws open the latch and drags a surprised looking Lance, who stumbles inside, and practically throws him towards Shiro. Shutting it quietly behind him, Keith looks a little frazzled as he slides his back against the door.

“Are you fucking brain dead?” Keith hisses to him, “Do you have any idea what kind of trouble we’ll be in if someone hears you?!”

“Oh ho, don’t you even start trying to put the blame here on  _ me _ ,” Lance whisper-shouts, straightening himself out and whipping around to poke a finger into his chest, “After that little stunt you just pulled in class, don’t even try to act like  _ you’re _ the innocent one here!”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Keith has never been a convincing liar, Shiro thinks, watching as he ducks into a squat so he can slip between Lance’s parted legs. He moves so quickly, so agilely, that Lance ends up poking the door for a moment before he realizes Keith is now behind him.

Shiro isn’t sure where his eyes should be settling on. Lance, with all his beautiful fury, advancing with clenched fists as he turns around and follows Keith, or Keith, snickering playfully as he dodges from the poorly-timed punches Shiro knows he’s more than capable of evading on his own.

“Hey,” Shiro finally speaks up, because when Lance moves to strike Keith again and misses, his foot accidentally hits one of the cockpit’s controls instead. The button makes a resounding  _ clang,  _ and there’s nothing Shiro would enjoy less than having either of them destroy the machinery in some manner.

They don’t stop right away, though, Keith sticking out his tongue until Lance flushes. Lance grabs for his uniform, looking like he’d prefer to sink his fist into his face.

“ _ Hey _ !” Shiro shouts a little louder, more irritably, and they both pause. Lance has Keith pulled close towards him by the collar, and Keith has his fist recoiled back. They both freeze at his low, commanding tone. “Alright, knock it off, before you guys actually end up damaging something. We’ve already drawn enough potential attention to ourselves as it is.”

Lance drops Keith without another word. Keith lowers his fist, looking guilty as he shuffles his feet.

“So, what happened?” Shiro turns to Keith first, hands on his hips. “You told me to come meet you here, but I didn’t realize you were planning on teasing Lance to the point he wanted to physically  _ fight you _ .”

Keith laughs when he says the word  _ ‘physically’ _ , and Shiro surely doesn’t miss the way he flashes that smug grin in Lance’s direction. At this point, Lance is so red in the face Shiro is afraid if he doesn’t sit down, he might pass out.

“It was nothing,” Keith says, draping himself against Shiro’s back, his hot breath tickling his neck, “Just a little fancy tongue-work. Not my fault he can’t handle a little teasing without popping a boner in the middle of class.”

He knows Keith’s tendency to get carried away in public. Shiro more than knows about his _ ‘little fancy tongue-work’ _ —god, does he know. He knows Keith’s preference to humiliate, how he gets off on seeing him squirm in situations where they could possibly be caught. Shiro’s more than into it, but he’s not so sure, really, if Lance is too.

He’s still not sure what Lance is into at all, besides being kissed and watching him and Keith shower. The erection he had then had been telling, but without any communication about all this, he knows they can’t continue acting like it doesn’t need to be addressed at some level.

“I-I,” Lance splutters, one hand coming to steady himself on the cockpit chair, “I-I didn’t pop a boner, you lying asshole, I d-didn’t, I  _ hate _ you…”

“He looked at me first,” Shiro can feel Keith shrug behind him as he tries to rationalize it, and he can definitely feel the hand creeping over his ass, tracing over it before he dips just the barest between his legs. Shiro inhales a large, shaky breath. “He should have been paying attention to the lesson. Especially since his grades are so  _ bad _ .”

Lance’s scowl returns in full force, his frown deepens. There’s a pain there, around and in his eyes, and Shiro knows with Keith distracted behind him, he probably can’t see it as clearly as he can.

“Keith,” Shiro warns, gently disentangling himself from his groping hands. Keith makes a disgruntled noise, before falling back and relenting.

Keith crosses his arms, sensing what Shiro means without even having to look him in the eye. His huffy demeanor flattens out when he glances towards Lance, who’s standing there silently, looking a bit lost for words.

“Alright, sorry,” Keith says, his eyes flickering like flames over the angular lines of Lance’s body. “That was...kind of harsh, I guess. Okay, Lance. What is it exactly you want to do here?” When Lance perks up and opens his mouth, Keith adds with a sigh, “ _ Besides _ kick my ass.”

Lance closes his mouth for a few moments, frowning again, like he’s just now considering such a question. For a while, he looks between them, before settling an uncertain, lost stare right at Shiro.

There’s another stretch of awkward silence, before he says, softly, “...what, uh, exactly  _ can _ I do?” He gulps audibly, fingers playing at the hem of his uniform. “I mean, obviously you two are together, and I...I…” Lance’s fingers still, and he tugs at his collar. There’s sweat visibly beading on his brow. “I mean, you seem...close. I wouldn’t want to interfere in that, and I, uh, I’m just...am I really interpreting this right, here? Like, do you guys seriously want to, you know...uh,  _ ‘be’ _ with me?”

Seeing his nervousness, Shiro can’t help but feel bad. He thinks that maybe, they could have gone about this differently. He knows a certain level of suggestion was necessary to get through to a person like Lance, someone he’s been watching since the second he took note of the way Lance’s eyes fixated on him and Keith whenever they were nearby, but he wonders if maybe it would have been easier to just put it all out into words from the start.

Keith leans back against the control panel. His lips are pressed together, forehead creased in that way that Shiro recognizes means he isn’t sure what to say, or probably where to start. They’ve talked about this, between themselves, plenty of times. The air’s far been cleared there, and he’s not worried when both of them eagerly agreed to adding another person to the mix. But Shiro knows, if they’re ever going to get past this and be able to move things forward, he’s going to have to be the one to play mediator.

Especially because this heavy tension between Keith and Lance isn’t as easily brushed off as just being sexual.

“Lance,” he says, drawing closer to him. “You can do whatever you want. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“Whatever I want?” Lance echoes, sounding astonished. The stretch of his eyes is comically wide, and Keith’s chuckle filters from behind them. “Seriously..?”

Shiro nods, and when he moves to place his hands on Lance’s arms, Lance doesn’t flinch away. He stares up into his eyes, and Shiro feels himself get lost in the deep, dark flecks of blue resting there. “Keith and I have known each other and been together for a long time, that’s true. But we’ve been watching you for a while, and we’d really be more than happy for you to join us in our relationship. We think there’s a lot you could offer, and a lot we could offer you, too. If you’d like.”

Lance allows him to cup his chin, and gently stroke his cheek. He flushes, and glances to the side. “Is this, uh, just like a s-sex thing, or…”

“It’s a whatever you want thing,” Shiro reiterates, thinking back to what he and Keith talked about, “If you want to just have sex with us, there’s no pressure for anything more. But we would really like to, you know, date you as well. You know, Keith’s not much of a romantic.”

Shiro laughs when he hears Keith exclaim, in barely contained horror, “Shiro!”

Shiro leans in, so he can whisper into Lance’s ear without Keith hearing. “It’s a touchy subject, see? So it’d be nice to have someone I could bring out to dinner and buy flowers for without fighting them over it, if you know what I mean.”

Lance relaxes more under his grip, and laughs loudly. “Oi, mullet. You seriously won’t let your own boyfriend take you out?! That’s so  _ sad _ .”

“Don’t tease him too much about it,” Shiro smiles. He glances towards Keith, who’s fixating hard at a point of the control panel, teeth gritting. Shiro knows he’ll pay for that later in some manner, but he’s glad to see it’s removed some of the tension clouding the air.

For a moment after that, no one says anything. Shiro continues to draw small circles with his thumbs over Lance’s cheeks, and he can see Keith shuffling uncomfortably in his peripherals. They’ve only sneaked in here a few times to mess around, but he knows that Keith has conflicted feelings about it.

He gets a private kind of thrill out of messing around in the ships that he’ll someday practice in. Shiro thinks that the excitement of eventually piloting one of these only amplifies his arousal. But sometimes, once they’ve finished and he settles back in his seat—Keith curled up on his lap or rising to fetch the crushed pack of cigarettes out of his uniform pocket to smoke outside, he can’t help but notice the small inkling of regret that he can see dancing around behind the barricade of numbness in his eyes.

It’s the most vulnerable that Shiro will ever witness Keith for a very long time. In these moments, he’s acutely aware that Keith has a level of respect for the Garrison that is unrivaled by anything else.

Except, frequently unbeknownst to him, Shiro himself.

Lance twitches slightly, stiffening beneath him and turning to stare at Keith. Their eyes don’t meet for very long before Lance looks away, knitting his brows and reaching up to wrap his fingers around Shiro’s wrists. He seems uncomfortable under the heat of Keith’s unwavering stare. Shiro bites back the urge to reassure him that this will disappear with time.

Lance doesn’t know that Keith is just as fascinated with him as he is with Keith. He doesn’t understand that Keith was just as willing to involve him in their relationship as Shiro was. Shiro wonders what kind of person Lance thinks that Keith really is. He wonders what sort of conclusion a person on the outside might come to while looking in at them.

“I—” Lance clears his throat, pulling Shiro’s hands gently away from his face and holding his wrists between them. He’s flicking his gaze from somewhere vaguely in Keith’s direction, then back to Shiro’s soft smile, as though he knows exactly what he wants, but he’s too afraid of being made fun of to actually say it.

It’s fair enough, Shiro thinks, albeit a little guiltily. It took Keith a very long time to wrap his head around how hard he should tease someone until he actually hurt their feelings. He feels silly now, thinking back to all of the times that Keith accidentally made him cry when they were kids. He should have developed a thicker skin, he was far too sensitive for a boy his age.

But Keith learned those lessons the hard way, and he never allowed himself to forget them. Even when he watches himself closely, however, he still doesn’t seem to completely grasp the concept of keeping some unflattering thoughts to himself.

That bluntless is something that Shiro has come to admire about Keith. He always knows that he can rely on him to be genuine and to never hold anything back. But he can understand how Lance might be nervous about it. He knows that it’s not easy to trust someone not to hurt him when he’s baring himself like this, and maybe Keith’s sharp tongue is only making things harder.

“You can say it,” Keith says, his voice hushed, subtly bashful. Out of the corner of his eye, Shiro can see him staring up at the roof of the ship, his head tipped back and throat exposed as though Lance has any way of understanding that exposing himself like this is his way of looking unintimidating and approachable.

Shiro laughs just a little, and both Keith and Lance jump.

“No one is going to judge you, Lance. Keith wants you here just as much as I do.”

Finally, the nervous layers of Lance’s resolve pull away. He drops Shiro’s wrists, rubbing a hand over his reddened face and adjusting his feet on the floor.

“Alright,” he says, and his voice cracks a little at the end. He’s trying very hard to appear confident now, but neither Keith or Shiro say anything about it. “Can…can I kiss you then?”

Shiro’s smile widens. He nods once, sharply.

He’s surprised when Lance leans forward and bumps their noses together, clumsy and inexperienced. Lance’s long fingers thread in the front of his uniform, tugging him downward and closer, forcing him into an awkward stance with his shoulders slumped just enough that their lips meet on the third try.

He wonders how many people Lance has kissed before this—if he’d stolen a few smooches after movie-theater dates in high school, if he’d kissed some cute girl at his prom. He wonders how many people Lance has brought into the town nearby—wining and dining them at the small bar in the center of the loop of family-owned businesses, that only stay afloat from the revenue of Garrison students sneaking out—slow-dancing to soft country tunes until the night melts into the drunken, blurry mirth of sloppy kisses and hands desperately groping around in search of anything that feels good enough to keep them awake.

He stops himself from laughing when a tongue stabs between his lips, making a sloppy show of moving around as though Lance is trying to taste every part of him. It tickles the roof of his mouth behind his teeth, glides around his own as though Lance is trying to knot them together. It’s different from the way that Keith kisses him—enthusiastic but untrained, while Keith only kisses with a purpose and a clear need for dominance. Lance is trying every move that he’s probably ever read in any _ Cosmo _ that he could get his hands on. He’s putting on such a show that Shiro feels a little guilty for wiping the spit away from the corners of his lips when they pull away.

He allows himself to be pressed back by Lance until the pilot’s seat hits the back of his calves. He bites his lip to hide his smile as Lance tentatively ushers for him to sit, pushing weakly at his shoulders and climbing on top of his lap once he finds a comfortable position in the cushion.

Those lips are on him again in seconds, sloppily working over his mouth, along his jaw, down toward his neck as Lance trembles and his cheeks grow redder and redder. Shiro finds himself enamored with this sort of genuine innocence—with the way that Lance keeps moving forward despite how obvious it is that he’s dying of embarrassment, how he continues to try despite how terribly his hands are shaking. He’s so hard against the seam of his uniform pants that Lance lets out a startled cry when his ass accidentally rubs over it.

“I-I’m sorry,” Shiro whispers, a heavy huff of energy built up inside of him rushing out, “You’re kind of driving me wild here.”

Lance’s eyes widen. Keith makes a small noise in the back of his throat, somewhere behind them, that Shiro recognizes as pure, astonished arousal. He wonders briefly if Keith will touch himself or if he’ll wait to take his turn with whoever is left in the end. He wonders if Keith will even be able to wait that long, or if he’ll force his way into the middle of this once everything becomes too hard to bear.

“I’m—” Lance gulps, his hands jittering against Shiro’s shoulders. He’s hard too, Shiro can feel it pressing against him, but he says nothing about it. “I-I…okay.”

Keith snorts behind them and Lance looks toward him in a flash, already getting worked up within the span of the two seconds that it takes for either of them to realize where the noise even came from. He’s digging his fingers harder into Shiro’s skin now, shuddering with anger and humiliation and unrelenting arousal, and Shiro doesn’t miss the way that his cock twitches enthusiastically when he looks over his shoulder and glares right in Keith’s direction.

He wishes that he could see Keith’s face right now—what Lance might have found there to get him so excited. He’s never allowed anyone else to take him apart but Keith, and Keith has never so willingly accepted another person into their midst as he has with Lance. Shiro wants nothing more than to find himself tangled up between them, taking the brunt of their aggression and sexual tension, allowing himself to be strung out and molded in their hands.

He lets out a deep breath through his nose, raising his hands to steady Lance on his lap as Lance wobbles, stabbing an accusatory finger in Keith’s direction.

“What the  _ fuck _ are you laughing about, Mullet?” Lance practically shrieks. Shiro tips his head back, counting to ten silently and telling himself that this is an important step in the right direction, hopefully. “What, jealous that I’m mackin’ on your boyfriend? That I’m getting him…  _ h-hard _ like this?”

Keith lets out another laugh when Lance fumbles with his words, but before Lance can retort or Shiro can put an end to their bickering, he replies flatly, and simply, “I like seeing you get worked up. You’re cute like this.”

Lance is so stunned that he allows Shiro to pull him back down and grind his hips upward, their erections bucking together beneath their respective uniform pants.

“He likes to watch,” Shiro whispers, taking a moment to kiss Lance again on the lips, before working himself up for the next embarrassing thing that he’s going to say.

It’s important, he tells himself. Lance needs to know that this is okay.

“He likes to watch me touch myself sometimes,” he draws out, as low and sultry as he can manage, “He wants to watch you touch me too, and…he wants to watch me touch you…”

Lance makes a noise that is neither entirely mortified or lustful, but maybe a mixture of both. His breathing is ragged and needy, his fingers tangling in the fabric of Shiro’s shirt as Shiro reaches between both of them and begins tugging open his belt.

“Do whatever you want to me, Lance,” he breathes, “But please… _ touch me _ .”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A special thanks to [ichimatsusama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ichimatsusama/gifts) for going through all of the mess that I’ve written and doing a very quick beta! I swear, you can go over these things a million times and still miss something. So if you see anything weird(er than it’s supposed to be), please let me know!
> 
> And, as always, thank you so much for reading! See you next week!


	8. Coup de Foudre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance gets a little taste of fame.

Lance used to fantasize about being famous a lot when he was a kid. He used to put on his mom’s most expensive coat and step into a pair of her old heels. He’d wrap himself in the furry, neon pink boa that his older sister had bought years ago for a long-forgotten costume party with her friends, sashaying about her bedroom and admiring himself in the tall, wide mirror that she’d placed in the corner on the floor.

He’s sure that his family still has the humiliating photo evidence of this hidden somewhere, that they used to show to his friends and potential girlfriends every time that he brought anyone home—but that’s beyond the point. It doesn’t matter, he’s over it. No one at the Garrison needs to know how many times he got grounded for using all of his mother’s makeup to look like Audrey Hepburn in  _ ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ _ or Molly Ringwald in _ ‘Pretty in Pink’ _ . They don’t have to find out that his vision of  _ superstar _ was limited to the women who walked the red carpet on TV or the girls who adorned all of the glossy magazine covers that his older sister kept in her room.

He was just a confused little kid. It didn’t mean anything, and it’s not even relevant to his current line of thinking.

He’s not even sure why he’s suddenly getting so hung up on this at all.

The point is, he just wanted to feel like he was on top of the world, even in a small town that was barely as wide as the Garrison’s front yard. He wanted to make something of himself, to be  _ important _ . He wanted the entire universe to know his name.

In the mundane day-to-day in a small nondescript place right off the coast of Cuba, nothing extraordinary ever seemed to happen. He wanted to shatter the world, he wanted to do something that meant  _ anything _ .

He wanted to mean something to another person, who wasn’t his mom or his friends, his teachers or neighbors or anyone else who had known him since he was born.

He’d been eager to prove himself to strangers, to prove to  _ himself _ that he was worthy of any love that wasn’t already expected. He wanted to be the kind of person who could be anyone’s best friend. He just wanted for people to like him.

It was a pathetic dream that had fueled him to study so hard for his Garrison entry exams. It was a private hope that he knew made him weaker and less deserving than everyone else around him. He wonders if this is why Keith is so much better—if his reason for coming here wasn’t fueled by vanity and loneliness, if the hole that he’d hoped to fill inside of himself was far more profound than anything that Lance could ever hope to understand.

And he’s thinking about this now, as he’s staring down into Shiro’s eyes, watching his red-faced reflection open and close his mouth like a hooked fish flailing in the air. Shiro is someone who turns heads when he passes by. He’s an amazing person, someone inspiring and comforting without even trying. He’s the embodiment of everything that Lance has ever wanted for himself, a singular goal that he’s never quite figured out if he wanted to reach or…simply _ fondle _ until the both of them are a writhing, sweaty mess.

For now, it’s the latter. He’ll worry about the semantics later. Shiro is already looking a little nervous, and he can feel Keith shuffling about impatiently behind the pilot’s chair. He bites his tongue, letting out a shaky breath and forcing himself to focus.

Shiro is staring at him as though he’s nothing short of the entire universe. He’s watching him with so much wonder that he might as well be a constellation collected far off in the night sky. It’s overwhelming, to say the least, and Lance isn’t so sure anymore if he would be able to handle fame. He doesn’t know if he has the guts to be watched this intensely by more than two people at a time.

Even after all this time, he can still barely manage to meet Keith’s eyes.

He scoffs, telling himself that if he doesn’t look at Keith, he might as well not even be here at all. He ignores the swelling in his gut, telling him that this is only more exciting with an audience, that he might not enjoy it as much if they were going at it away from Keith’s intense, unyielding staring. His secret urges to touch Keith were what led him here in the first place, and he can’t ignore that no matter how much he tries.

He doesn’t even want to think about what that means. He still can’t quite admit that he doesn’t despise Keith being here. And he won’t admit, even to himself, that he’s looking forward to what Keith will do once he gets his fill of being a dirty voyeur.

“Lance?” Shiro questions softly, stroking a hand up his side while the other finally manages to undo his belt. Lance watches the way that his fingers pop the button and pull down the zipper. He swallows hard when Shiro reaches inside, pulling out a girthy mound of his underwear that Lance knows is ninety-nine percent penis and only one-percent cloth.

And he’s seen it before, briefly, he knows, but there’s something about looking at it like this—so close and so within his reach with everything that’s happening completely in his control—that rattles a feeling of intense, agonizing arousal deep inside of his bones.

“I-I’m okay,” Lance mumbles, slowly, hesitantly reaching forward and running a finger over the material of Shiro’s boxers—groaning deep in the back of his throat when he feels the firm heat of Shiro’s cock through the fabric. “I’ve just…I’ve never done this before.”

Shiro seems to think that what he means is that he’s never touched another man’s penis, and not that this is his first time doing anything sexual at all. He nods in understanding, dragging his hand from Lance’s waist and stroking between his legs. Lance wishes that Shiro would pull out his erection as well. He’s far too mortified to do it himself, especially as he feels the air displacing somewhere behind the pilot’s chair, as Keith moves around to get a better look at them.

He’s reminded briefly of the small amount of nature documentaries that he managed to stay awake through as a kid—of great white sharks lurking just beneath the water’s surface, waiting to leap out and dig their razor-sharp teeth into unassuming prey.

“It’s just like touching a girl, I think,” Shiro says softly, and Lance is more thankful when he begins to undo his fly than he’s ever been of anything in his life, “But also like touching yourself. You just have to keep trying different things until you find something that works. Just like with girls, everyone likes something different.”

He jerks his head gently to the side as though he’s trying to get a look at Keith, who has tucked himself so far back into the shadows of the ship that Lance can barely see him anymore.

Good, he thinks. He doesn’t want Keith’s stupid face ruining this experience for him. He can watch like a filthy pervert from the corner, but he’d better keep his mouth shut.

He knows deep down that he doesn’t mean that, but his false cockiness gives him a little boost of confidence nonetheless.

Shiro isn’t shy about pulling Lance’s erection out of his boxers. He doesn’t even give Lance enough time to feel embarrassed about being so exposed. He strokes it slowly, gripping it so lightly that Lance can feel his head swimming with need. He bucks into Shiro’s hand despite how desperately he’s trying to play it cool. A tremor works up inside of him—the realization that this is _ real _ and this is actually happening to him just now starting to settle in.

It takes him a moment to remember that he should be touching Shiro too. He juggles the idea of dropping down between Shiro’s legs and taking him into his mouth—wowing him with his oral abilities that surely rival those of a stick in the mud like Keith. But then he’s thinking about the way that Shiro had fallen apart so easily in Keith’s experienced hands, how they’ve surely done this so many times that he could never hope to reach that level of practiced ease in a billion years.

His insecurity kills that idea before he even manages to move at all, and he’s left here squirming in Shiro’s grasp, breathing out in shallow puffs as he tries to build up the nerve to do anything but sit here and take it like a chump.

Shiro pushes himself up, pressing their lips together. It’s so unusual seeing him acting as the aggressor—after witnessing Keith in control so many times now—that he almost forgets that this is how so many of his late-night fantasies begin.

He can’t stop himself from feeling like a loser, but he also can’t bring himself to move. He’s gripping Shiro’s erection now, still tangled in his boxers, his fingers sliding against the precum that soaks into the fabric at the tip. It’s hot and thick in Lance’s hand. He’s overwhelmed by the idea that he could do something like this to Takashi Shirogane, that he could get him this worked up all on his own.

In the back of his thoughts, for a mere second, he wonders if Keith is also just as hard. He wonders how he would feel in this position, pinned down under Lance’s knees, kissing him with that same passion that he exudes every time that he takes a seat in the simulator.

It’s absolutely, positively a cruel trick of the universe that this is the thought that drives him over the edge. That the idea of Keith watching them unseen, getting worked up by all of this, perhaps even  _ touching himself _ to the image of Lance strung out and keening in his boyfriend’s hand is the one thing that forces a strangled cry from his lips as his seed spills over Shiro’s knuckles and drizzles down to stain into his sleeve.

His chest is rising and falling rapidly, he’s gasping hopelessly for air. He can feel Shiro’s smile stretching out over his lips before the comforting words fill up the space between them when he pulls away.

“It’s okay,” Shiro tells him, softly, quietly, as though he’s ever done this with someone who came this quickly before, “Don’t worry about it, it’s okay.”

But it’s not okay, not really. He can’t imagine an overachiever like Keith ever failing to last more than a lousy two minutes in Shiro’s hands. As with everything else, he’s sure that Keith wowed him on the first try. He’s sure that his performance has only gotten better as the days have went on.

He’s positively horrified by the time that the warm daze of his orgasm ebbs away. He wants nothing more than to melt into the cracks of the floor and live out the rest of his days as the dirt that some poor pilot will have to scrape out of the creases of their boots. He doesn’t even want to look anywhere near where Keith is hiding. He doesn’t want to know anything that he might have to say about this.

He hates the way that he trembles now, so embarrassed and so disappointed in himself. He hates the nervous tears that prickle at the corners of his eyes. He’s still holding onto Shiro’s dick as though he has any idea of what to do with it, or any of the resolve required to actually try to please him too. He’s leaning back against Shiro’s knees, shaking his head, wishing that the top of the ship could tear open, that a gigantic tornado would rip through the roof and carry him off into the sky. He wishes for anything but Shiro sitting here coddling him while Keith watches silently, judging him for being such an inexperienced jackass.

He knows that he has a tendency to crack under pressure. He knows that his mom used to chide him for being too dramatic in the wrong situations.

But he can’t stop himself from flinching when Shiro wipes his hand off on the leg of his pants and reaches up to touch his face.

He can’t stop himself from screeching at the top of his lungs, so shrill that he can even see Keith jumping in the shadows just behind Shiro’s head, “It was my first time, okay?! I’ve never done this before! I—I hadn’t even kissed anyone before I walked in on you two—you two  _ fucking  _ in the shower, so what do you want from me?! I don’t have any clue what I’m doing, okay?! I’m sorry!”

The only redeeming thing out of any of this, is the shock that is now resting on Shiro’s face.

“Your first time..?” he gasps after a few moments of tense silence, silence so thick and heavy in the air it might as well be tangible, “D-doing  _ anything _ ? Oh,  _ God _ ...”

His thumb pauses over Lance’s quivering bottom lip. Shiro’s other hand comes to his own lips, brushing over them as if he can't quite comprehend any of this. He’s stretching his neck to look to Keith — whether for backup, or some far cry for help, Lance isn’t so sure. All he knows, is that he feels like a fool right now. He feels like a fool for admitting something he should have just kept to his damn self. They assumed he was experienced! Why did he have to ruin that illusion?!

Him and his big, stupid, fat mouth. Surely, they won’t want to do anything further with a wimpy virgin. Surely, they’re judging him about tenfold now that they realize how humiliating this all is.

Surely, they’re going to laugh in his face. Shiro’s going to zip up his pants, gather Keith in his arms, and call it a day without another word.

Lance knows. He can just see it now — the way Keith will throw that mocking gaze on him in class more than usual, how Shiro will give pitying glances at him from the corners of his eyes while he’s giving speeches to the cadets in the auditorium.

“Sorry, I…” Lance takes in a shuddering breath, because he doesn’t want to stop at all now that he’s finally come this far. He actually has Shiro right where he wants him, physically and metaphorically, but he doesn’t feel an ounce of confidence anymore that he can be half as successful as Keith is in getting him off. “I don’t really know what to do, so maybe I should just—”

“His neck,” Keith’s voice is a quiet, weak thing that filters through all the panicked thoughts rising in his head. Still, it’s low and firm, like heavy-laden silk that wraps around Lance and squeezes tight in the pits of his stomach, threatening to get him worked up all over again. Lance whips around to him, freezing in place with a questioning raise of his eyebrow.

“Huh?”

Keith’s demeanor is still as infuriating and huffy as it usually is, but his eyes are at least absent of the pity and remorse that Shiro’s are filled with as he draws nearer and reveals himself more from the shadows.

“You want to do this right, right?” Keith clicks his tongue, coming up behind Shiro and laying a hand over the longest tuft of his hair. His fingers tangle into it, tugging until Shiro gives a small, drawn-out moan.

Lance feels himself nodding, swallowing thickly as he glances at the flush still laying across Shiro’s high cheekbones, down to the way he’s biting his lip, obviously far gone in arousal regardless of the fact Lance sucks at basically everything.

“Then suck on his neck,” Keith says, tapping at the juncture where Shiro’s shoulder curves into the strained tendons of his neck, “He’s really sensitive right  _ here _ .”

Hesitantly, Lance lowers his lips to where Keith’s pointing. For a second, he hovers over the smooth skin there, puffing out warm torrents of air, wondering if maybe he’s being played here. Wondering if Keith can even be trusted not to be a huge dick to him, and yell  _ ‘psych!’  _ right in the middle of his attempts to get Shiro off.

But he doesn’t, and Shiro is groaning before he even lays his mouth on him. He’s shifting under him, bucking his hips up. A whimper tumbles out near Lance’s ear when he takes the dive, and sucks back on the skin.

Keith isn’t lying to him.

“You don’t have to be gentle,” Keith continues speaking, and Lance can hear clear amusement rising in his voice, “Don’t be fooled by the way he acts. He likes it rough, trust me.”

Lance can feel Keith’s soft hair tickling his neck when he leans towards Shiro’s ear on the other side, and does something Lance can only feel the response of in the way that Shiro squirms under him.

“Don’t you,  _ Takashi _ ?” Keith’s voice is a low, gravelly murmur, and Lance feels himself moaning in tandem with Shiro into the skin he’s worrying between his teeth.

“Go ahead and bite him, Lance,” Keith suggests, drawing away again until Shiro whines, and Lance’s blood boils hot.

His skin feels feverish. His head is light, like a balloon with too much air. There’s already the beginnings of a newfound erection pushing against his closed zipper.

Lance is as irritated by Keith’s need to command as he is turned on by it, and when he sinks his teeth into the sweet, salt-slicked skin of his idol, he can tell that Shiro more than shares this sentiment with him.

Shiro’s hands have fallen to the backs of his thighs, gripping there with just as much strength as Lance has always imagined in his dreams. Keith is yanking hard enough on his hair that his whimpers turn into breathy, needy moans in no time at all — especially combined with the way Lance is testing what he can do.

It isn’t much different than kissing someone, Lance thinks as he pulls the skin a little more harshly between his teeth. Keith is laughing, that bubbling, happy sound Lance can’t ever seem to shake from his head after hearing it echoing off of cheap tile.

“Lance…” Shiro groans, and Lance has never heard his name sound  _ so good _ . “Please…”

“Touch him already, geez,” Keith sounds more taunting now, exactly like Lance has been expecting, because when is Keith not annoying? “He’s asking you so nicely…”

“I’m getting to it, chill out!” Lance pulls back to grumble to him. “Why don’t you just go fuck off back to being a perverted creep, and let me think for a second, okay?!”

There’s sweat trickling down the back of his neck, making an uncomfortable itch within his collar. He thinks about what this might be like without the barrier of clothing one day, how it could possibly feel to experience Shiro’s broad, bare chest pressing against his own.

Running a hand through his hair, Lance glares at Keith, who backs away and puts his hands up, as if in show of a truce. He shoves his hands into his pockets when he falls back to the control panel again, smile a lopsided echo of mischief tugging up the side of his face.

Lance curses Keith under his breath for a few seconds, before going back to ignoring him, like he deserves to be ignored.

It’s a mistake in some aspects, because he gets the full effect of seeing Shiro’s face now — the desperation lining it, the uneven puffs of his breathing. His chest is heaving, his cock twitching beneath the fabric of his boxers. The wet spot on the cloth has almost doubled.

It makes him proud, to know he can have that kind of effect on another person.

And not just any person.

Lance lightly brushes over his cock, watching the way it jumps more eagerly. Shiro is throwing back his head, hands leaving his thighs and coming to clutch at the arms of the chair instead. Gulping down the nervous lump in his throat, Lance ignores the endless fluttering of nerves in the pit of his stomach, and pulls the seams of the crotch open.

When Lance closes his hand around hot, throbbing flesh, Shiro’s entire body shudders. The noise he makes, a rising whine between clenched teeth, encourages Lance enough that he  strokes up, the way he knows feels good on himself.

“Lance,” Shiro breathes, head tilting to the side, “Can you do it a little harder, please..?”

“S-sure,” Lance croaks, nodding until he feels dizzy, and clenches with more force.

He pumps slowly, stroking from the base to the tip, and then back down again with clumsy, shaking hands. Shiro has an impressive girth, and Lance is briefly distracted by the thought of how Keith’s petite fingers could ever hope to wrap around it nearly as well as his own.

His thoughts trail again. Keith is watching them somewhere, with those intense, dark eyes. Shiro is moaning beneath him, saying encouraging words that Lance only half hears.

“Takashi,” Lance says, before leaning down and pressing a sloppy kiss to his lips. He assumes that he’s close enough to Shiro now that he’s more than earned the right to call him that as much as Keith has. It must be a sign of trust between them, being able to use his first name so casually. Lance might have to share that victory with Keith, but it’s still a victory, all the same.

But when Lance says it, Shiro’s eyes widen. His hips raise high, high off the seat — as high as they can possibly go with Lance sitting on him. Lance can feel every muscle of his tense, and then there’s a spurt of something hot and wet gushing between his fingers and coating his palm. Shiro slumps back, limp in all the right ways. Lance is on an adrenaline rush so high that he doesn’t even care that Keith is doubled over with laughter somewhere to the side of them.

“I…” Lance stills with his hand around him, staring at the cum trickling down to his wrist, and then back towards Shiro in no small amount of shock. “Are you...ok? Was that, I mean, was I...you know, good…?”

There’s the pressure of a hand at his shoulder, and Lance jumps a bit at the unexpected touch.

Keith threads his fingers through his own hair this time, which Lance allows, only because he’s feeling particularly generous today.

Generous enough that he just managed to give Takashi Shirogane an apparently mindblowing orgasm.

“Yes, Lance,” Keith whispers breathily at his ear, pulling the lobe of it between his teeth until Lance feels a whimper push up his throat. His blunted fingernails graze his scalp, scratching lightly, and it sends white-hot pricks of pleasure skittering down Lance’s spine. “You did  _ very _ good.”

Lance wants to say bitterly, “I wasn’t asking  _ you _ ,” but when his eyes land on Shiro’s wide, encouraging smile, he keeps his big mouth shut for the first time in his life.

Keith’s hot lips travel just below his ear, dusting the breathiness of his words along Lance’s sweaty skin in a way that raises goose pimples just under the nape of his neck. Lance shudders, but for whatever reason, he bites back the urge to lash out at him and tell him to back off before he makes good on his threats to kick his ass.

It’s only right, anyway, since he was so helpful with Shiro earlier. At least, that’s the best excuse that he can come up with as Keith’s hands slide from his shoulder down to his chest, unbuttoning the front of his uniform with such ease that all of this is starting to feel a little bit like an elaborate fever dream.

“See?” Keith’s voice is a rush of waves against the shore—the resounding roar of applause, the sound of water pattering against shower tiles in a steamy locker room. “You were so worried about finishing too fast, but you made  _ Takashi _ cum even faster.”

There’s a bite to his words that Lance knows is meant to go right over his head. Shiro curses long and low under his breath, his eyelids fluttering as he eases off of his orgasm. He’s watching the two of them lazily now, limp and rubbery as he relaxes in the seat, a strange mixture of emotions swimming behind his eyes.

“But I wonder…” Keith’s words bubble up and fade away like smoke evaporating in the air. When he’s this close, Lance can smell the hint of tobacco clinging to his clothes—the machine oil, the subtle scent of sweat, the muskiness of the men’s locker room’s body wash, and something else that he can’t quite put a name to. “Do you think you could get me off just as fast..?”

Shiro curses again—still quiet, still groggy and lax beneath Lance’s quivering knees. He seems entirely too happy to be sitting here watching the two of them go back and forth. He seems, Lance thinks with a nervous gulp, like a kid opening up their presents on Christmas morning—like this is everything that he could have ever dreamed of and so much more.

Lance considers himself the sort of person who can never disappoint an adoring fan. This is the reason that he tells himself why he allows Keith to turn him gently, coaxing his knees to shuffle and shifting his weight until he’s sitting with his backside in Shiro’s lap.

When Keith kisses him, he isn’t expecting the teeth. Shiro didn’t bite him or nibble on his bottom lip. He didn’t nip at his tongue when he’d tested his boundaries by dipping it inside of his mouth. Where Shiro’s kisses had been the slow drizzle of an afternoon sunshower, Keith’s are a hurricane ripping through entire towns. He’s all groping hands and pushing boundaries—an overwhelming mixture of pleasure and pain that has Lance’s head reeling and his cock immediately standing at attention once again.

Keith isn’t gentle when he pushes Lance back into Shiro. With a knee between both of their legs on the pilot’s seat, he’s leaning in to leave a single, sharp pin-prick of a bite on Lance’s neck, before leaning further upward and kissing Shiro as well.

But he’s not ignoring Lance—not how Lance had expected. He’s grinding with much purpose into Lance’s lap with each kiss, shoving their clothed erections together and bucking up. Lance listens to the sound of Shiro’s ragged breathing, to the sound of Keith’s heart pounding so close to his ear. He’s biting his lip hard to cage the moans that so desperately want to escape him—wondering if Keith’s heart always beats this fast when he’s excited, wondering if this is just as fresh and new and absolutely terrifying for him as it is for everyone else.

Before he can collect himself completely, Keith’s mouth is sucking lightly at the side of his neck. His hands are everywhere at once, and it takes Lance a moment to realize that Shiro is touching him too. Someone is pulling open the front of his shirt, someone is fiddling with the fly of his pants, tugging him out into the dewy air of the small space between their bodies and giving his cock a few experimental pumps.

“Don’t…get him too worked up, Shiro.” Keith murmurs, pulling away from Lance’s skin with a resounding _ ‘pop’ _ of his lips. They’re swollen and darker pink. They’re so awfully kissable that Lance has to turn his head away to resist the urge to pull him over and make out with him all over again. “We don’t want him cumming too fast again.”

The breathy laugh that Keith lets out after is different than the one that Lance heard in the bathroom, but privately, he catalogues it in his memory, embedding it in the back of his thoughts for later on when he wakes up from this dream, hot and needy in the middle of the night, looking for something horrible to hold onto in order to finish himself off.

He’s only slightly aggravated by Keith’s teasing, far too distracted by the view that he can’t quite ignore out of the slit of his tightly-closed eyes. He pretends that he isn’t watching too closely as Shiro reaches up and unbuckles Keith’s belt. He tells himself that he isn’t opening his eyes wider for a better view—that he only needs to stay aware just in case either of them try anything funny when he’s not paying close enough attention.

The noise that he makes when Shiro finally manages to open the front of Keith’s pants is absolutely mortifying—but who could blame him, really? He hadn’t been prepared for Keith’s cock to lurch out, unhindered by the binding of any sort of underwear. Shiro lets out a gravelly laugh, and Lance refuses to look anywhere near Keith’s face. He doesn’t need to see the condescending smile that’s surely stretching out across his lips. He knows that sometimes people don’t wear underwear—sure, yeah, he’s heard of that before.

He’d just never imagined that anyone would ever do that sort of thing outside of porn or, shamefully, his own fantasies.

The place where his eyes settle is not much better than Keith’s face, if he’s completely honest with himself, but he can’t really say that he minds the view.

There’s a dark shadow of hair peppered just below Keith’s navel—leading down a straight path into the small brush of curls just above his eager, bobbing dick. It’s smaller than Shiro’s and nearly half as thick—pale and smooth around the base before leading up into a swollen, curiously purple-tinged head. Shiro had been far more intimidating, with the thick veins and the girth of it that had been almost too much to wrap his hand around. He’s surprised, momentarily, by how unassuming Keith really is once he finally gets comfortable enough with the sight of him bared naked in his lap to let all of this sink in.

It takes him a moment to realize that no one is moving. Shiro’s hands are still stroking his arm gently and teasing around the base of his erection, but Keith is hovering above them—a statue of warm, soft, pink-brushed flesh. When he finally tips his head up to try to figure out what might be going on behind Keith’s eyes, he doesn’t quite understand what he finds there.

Keith’s eyes are nearly black in the darkness of the ship. His pupils are so wide and blown out that Lance is momentarily reminded of his complicated alien fantasies from earlier in the morning. His chest is rising and falling slowly in purposeful, deep breaths, and his mouth is set in a straight, thin line, as though he’s thinking very hard about whatever he’s going to do next.

Lance thinks that this is an awful lot of hold-up for someone who was so impatient earlier, but before he can complain, Shiro’s voice reverberates against his back, warm and tender as it rushes against the shell of his ear.

“You’re doing great, Keith,” he soothes, breaking away from his slow ministrations to reach up and cup a hand against Keith’s burning cheek, “Just keep going, it’s okay.”

Everything about this grasps Lance somewhere far down in his heart, squeezing relentlessly and refusing to let go. He watches as Keith hesitates for a moment before jerking forward, how his face remains stoic but his movements are stiffer, less practiced than Lance has ever seen him move before.

He doesn’t quite understand what just happened, but he’s not stupid enough to say anything about it. Something rippled between the three of them—something heavy and emotionally-charged. He can feel the remnants of it easing away gradually, leaving him feeling far too raw and exposed, as though he’s pried his way into a private moment that wasn’t meant for his eyes to see.

But Shiro is kissing his neck now, in that soft, chaste way that Lance thinks he might prefer over Keith’s roughness. He’s whispering soothing things into his ear. Lance wonders briefly if he just witnessed a moment of panic—if Keith had clammed up this way during his first time with Shiro too, or the first time that he was touched by someone else.

He doesn’t really get it—why Keith had only shut down once he’d noticed Lance looking at him. He isn’t sure if it was something about his own face, about the way that he was gaping, or if Keith could read his mind somehow and knew that he was being judged. But that feels wrong, and Lance starts to get the idea that this goes a lot deeper than first-time anxiety. He tries to think back to Keith’s initial simulation trial—wondering if he’d dithered then as well—but he can only think about the uncomfortable way that Keith had cast down his eyes as everyone cheered, as though he didn’t know what to do with their admiration. As though he wasn’t accustomed to being looked at as though he had any value at all.

Within moments, he can’t focus enough to lament on it anymore. He files those thoughts away, telling himself that he’ll bring all of this up with Shiro another time, far away from Keith’s nosy earshot.

For now, Keith is leaning toward him again, pressing his erection against Lance’s and thrusting up—scattering a sensation of frustrating pleasure straight up Lance’s spine.

It’s not enough to really feel good, but something about it—something about feeling the firm heat of Keith’s cock rubbing against him—it’s so much and so little, and so agonizing that he can’t do anything but tip back his head and finally allow himself to let out a long, throaty whine.

“That’s it,” Shiro sighs, “he likes to hear you. He likes to know that he’s making you feel good.”

Lance is so appalled by this that he almost tells Shiro to stop talking, but his words get clogged up with the moans still quivering in his throat, coming out as nothing short of a garbled mess of consonants and erratic, disjointed sounds.

The roughness of Keith’s calloused hand binds their cocks closer together, and when he pumps, Lance swears that he can see stars. The world around him is black and thick and sensationless, but his body thrums with the cadence of his own heartbeat mingling with Shiro’s against his back, and Keith’s pulse tethered to him further south. He’s acutely in-tune with every movement against his skin—Shiro’s lips smooth and damp against his neck, his hands traveling up his chest and tweaking tentatively at his nipples; Keith bracing himself with claw-like fingers against his thigh with one hand, while his other shoots the white hot, invigorating electricity of pleasure through every inch of his veins.

He doesn’t have the mental capacity to hate himself for watching Keith now. He doesn’t have the will to question why he can’t look away from what he finds there. Keith’s head is turned downward, his sweaty bangs tangled against the dewy surface of his forehead, his thick brows knitted together in concentration and carnal bliss. His eyelashes are thick as they brush over high, rose-tinged cheekbones. Those perfectly white, uniform teeth peek out, digging hard into the red flesh of his swollen bottom lip.

He’s beautiful, Lance thinks, absolutely breathtaking. For a mere moment, he understands why Shiro is so enamored with someone like Keith Kogane. He isn’t vulnerable like Lance might have expected. He isn’t crying out or looking away in embarrassment. He doesn’t offer up a small piece of himself in exchange for everything that he expects from them in return. He doesn’t trust either of them enough to look them in the eyes as he swallows up the noises that Lance knows he’s having trouble not making—but he’s here right now: naked and open and bared, just like Lance. They’re equals as they rock together to the slow tempo of Keith’s hand.

His beauty is in his strength, in his innate ability to keep his composure when a bigger and stronger man might have given in and allowed himself to be weak.

Lance finds himself beginning to fall in love with his willfulness, even at a time like this, to take charge and not give into pleasure until surely, Lance has already cum a second time.

But Lance doesn’t respect that sort of stubbornness enough to stop himself from testing it. He chalks his next actions up to pure sex-drunkenness, telling himself later on that anyone else wouldn’t have been able to stop themselves from touching Keith either. It doesn’t mean that he’s stopped hating him. It doesn’t mean that he’s not going to kick his ass later on.

Keith is just gorgeous, and he’s dangerous in a way that Lance has never experienced before. He tests him like he might test a crocodile by dipping a single finger in the water—reaching forward and finally putting his hands to good use by knocking Keith’s out of the way.

Immediately, the mood around him shifts to something different, something more strained and stressed, and he doesn’t have to look at Keith to know that he’s making the same troubling expression as before. Lance allows himself to feel cocky enough to think that Keith is afraid that he’s been rejected, that he might be enjoying this so much that he’s disappointed that it might end too soon.

But he doesn’t revel in that for too long, because the feeling of those hot eyes smoldering against his skin is enough to urge him forward, and when he finally garners the nerve to wrap his hand around both of them and emulate Keith’s prior movements, he’s rewarded with what has to be the most magnificent noise that he’s ever had the pleasure of hearing.

Keith keens deep down in his throat. It’s quiet and barely there, but even Shiro perks up at the sound of it.

He continues moving his hand—up and down, stopping only to flick a thumb over the weeping head of Keith’s cock. Keith has moved his hands to either of the armrests, gripping them so tightly that his stiff, white knuckles are bright even in the darkness that envelops them. He’s trembling now, biting so hard at his bottom lip that Lance wonders if he’ll draw blood—and gradually, more of those tiny noises creep out of him, growing in loudness and tempo until finally, in a flash of hot wetness that is only muted by Lance’s own orgasm seconds later—he cums with a shuddering gasp and a desperate, sharp buck of his hips.

“Keith—” Shiro starts to say, but Keith cuts him off immediately.

“Sh-shut up, okay? I…I know.”

He’s wobbling haphazardly from his uneven spot on the edge of the seat. Lance sinks languidly against Shiro’s sturdy chest, a smile stretching out over his lips that he’s sure looks nothing short of a cat splayed out with a canary’s feathers still tangled in its whiskers. He watches with blurry eyes as Shiro reaches up and secures Keith with his hands on each of Keith’s hips. He’s never noticed how much Shiro’s size dwarfs Keith until now. He’s reminded briefly of King Kong grasping Ann Darrow in his mighty fist, and when he can’t stop himself from laughing, Keith sends him the nastiest, most bone-chilling glare that he’s ever been on the receiving end of.

Keith, of course, is the first one to break away. He fumbles around in his uniform pockets until he finds a balled up tissue that Lance tries his best not to turn his nose up at. He’s still boneless and lazy as Keith makes rough work of cleaning him up, snatching his hand and rubbing vigorously between each of his fingers until his skin’s left dry and just the slightest bit raw.

His smile widens and softens as Shiro plants another kiss against his neck, apologizing softly for the marks that Lance won’t fully experience the horror of until hours from now. He’ll catch sight of his dotted reflection in his bedroom mirror only after Hunk asks him if he’s okay, before making a panicked trip straight to commissary in search of a concealer that matches his skin tone well enough that no one will worry that he’s caught some kind of flesh-eating bacteria.

No one asks him if he enjoyed it like they do in the movies once everyone is cleaned up and dressed again. Keith wanders outside of the ship to smoke a cigarette—which Shiro clicks his tongue at and reminds him to pick up the butt this time—and Shiro allows Lance to stay in his lap until the alarm on his watch goes off and he announces that he has a mandatory meeting with the other higher-ranking officers, and he needs to shower before he goes.

The kiss that he leaves Lance with, however, is definitely Hollywood-level romantic. It’s the stuff of every sappy daydream that he’s ever dozed off having in the middle of class. He finds himself rooted and lightheaded, nothing but a head full of clouds and a swiftly-beating heart, until he watches Shiro kiss Keith as well before making his way toward the exit.

“Don’t forget to lock up on your way out!” he calls behind him.

He stumbles a bit, sending a light hearted glare over his shoulder when Keith yells back,  _ “Yes sir!” _ , standing at attention and holding up a sloppy salute.

Lance sits in the open doorway of the ship, watching silently as Keith lights up another cigarette. There are a thousand different thoughts that dance around in his head, but there’s nothing that he can think of to say that he thinks might be clever enough or interesting enough to hold Keith’s attention for very long.

“You did well in there,” Keith tells him eventually, dropping his half-burned cigarette and grinding it into the floor with his heel. Lance doesn’t say anything when he doesn’t pick it up. His tongue is far too useless and fat in his mouth. “You’ve set the bar pretty high, cargo pilot. So don’t let me down next time.”

Lance can’t concentrate on anything enough to even respond to the insult. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, watching as Keith pushes off of the side of the ship and makes his way through the door that Shiro just exited moments before. Over his shoulder he says, “Just close the door behind you when you’re done, okay? It locks automatically.”

And Lance nods dumbly, the only thing that he can manage to do, as he watches Keith slip through the door and wonders if he’d just imagined that Keith actually complimented him.

Something in his heart stirs. He doesn’t even want to think about what any of this means.

But later on, once he’s caked himself in enough cover-up that he has the confidence to attend the rest of his classes, he can’t stop himself from smiling like the dopey idiot that he’s starting to suspect that he might actually be.

Next time, Keith had told him.

_ ‘You did well in there.’ _

He doesn’t know how he might phrase this when he gushes to his mom about it later, but he does know, without a doubt, that only good things can happen from here on out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! Flyingisland here! The title for this week’s chapter, “Coup de Foudre” is a French idiom that’s commonly used to describe “love at first sight”. (luckily, none of my French-speaking pals are reading this story, or I think they might be rolling their eyes at me right now) It can also be used to describe a “sudden, unforeseen event”, which… I’ll just leave that hanging there because I think we can all get the picture here.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it! See you next week!


	9. Taming the Beast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Is… is it okay for me to touch you?”

Lance wakes up the next morning with an itchy sort of pain in his neck and a headache buzzing at the base of his skull.

He’d slept like a log last night—staying up just long enough to wash the makeup from his skin before shoveling a few dinner rolls into his mouth that Hunk had snatched from the dining room. He’d smothered them in cheese and garlic butter, before flopping down on his bed and very quickly becoming dead to the world.

He’s never been the kind of person who could be described as a “light sleeper”, but when he rolls out of his cocoon of blankets to the sound of his alarm clock blaring and notices, confused, that Hunk is gone and his bed is already neatly made, he wonders if he’s even outdone  _ himself  _ this time.

Belatedly, and with much horror, he realizes that he’s slept through his first class.

Of course, the one that he shares with Keith.

He slams his hand down on his alarm clock, silencing its screeching with a resounding  _ ‘thud’  _ and a prickle of pain from his palm up to his wrist, before practically flying out of bed and tripping over his feet in a hasty search for his uniform.

He’s in such a hurry to pull on his clothes and smear makeup over the purpling bruises on his neck that he doesn’t even stop to wet down his hair or brush his teeth. He smells a little funky after getting so down and dirty yesterday, but he tells himself that a demerit or two for breaking uniform codes won’t do enough damage to get his scholarship revoked.

He just needs to find Keith—to explain, he tells himself. Skipping their first class together has surely sent out a specific kind of message that he doesn’t want to give time to settle for too long in Keith’s head.

_ ‘Don’t let me down next time.’ _

He pauses in the doorway, taking in a deep breath and reminding himself that yesterday wasn’t a dream. Keith told him that there would be a next time. Shiro told him that everything was up to him—where they move from here, how far this relationship will go, and even what he wants it to be defined as. Part of him feels like a king sitting on his throne, watching the world move around him and knowing that he could allow entire civilizations to fall if he so willed it.

But another part of him is terrified. He doesn’t know how to behave under this pressure. He doesn’t know what he wants from them, or what they’re truly willing to give. He still isn’t sure if yesterday was a mistake, and if next time that he sees them, Shiro won’t meet his eyes as he explains,  _ “I’m sorry, Lance. We were sort of looking for someone with more experience.” _

But Keith’s parting words continue to rattle around in his thoughts. He barely talks enough to really get a feel for his personality on his best days, and he definitely isn’t the kind of person to dole out compliments lightly. He gets the feeling that whatever happened in the ship wasn’t entirely normal for them either—that he’d done something near the end there that had gotten Keith so hot and bothered that even Shiro had taken noticed.

Pride mingles with his anxiety as he smoothes down his bedhead with his hand, closing his door gently behind him. There are still a few people hanging around in the dorm hall, stopping in to drop off their books and grab new ones, talking to their friends about heading out into town for the weekend and spending time at the only bar for a good hundred miles.

He’s never actually taken the time to leave the Garrison since he came here. He wonders if Shiro will make good on his promise to take him out on a date—if somehow, they’ll even manage to drag Keith along with them.

And he wonders how normal this thing between them can really be. If someday they’ll be planning their weekends just like everyone else—if Keith will ever become so comfortable with him that he smiles in that soft, private way that he always does when he’s looking up at Shiro and he thinks that no one else is paying attention.

That thought stirs something in his chest. As he slips into class, he feels like he’s floating a few inches above the ground, on a dream-cloud of optimism and inordinate bliss.

His appearance earns him a few confused stares later on in the day, and after the third instructor stops him in the hall to belittle him for actually leaving his room without “having the respect for their establishment to be presentable”, he finally relents—heading back to his dorm for some toothpaste, his toothbrush, and a towel for the shower—and makes his way toward the locker room to finally clean himself up.

It’s all well and good anyway. He wasn’t particularly excited by the concept of sitting through math while he still needs to explain himself to Keith—before he gets the wrong idea and says something to Shiro about all of this. By some mysterious serendipity of the universe, as he’s passing by the gymnasium on his way from his room to the showers, he catches a small peek of the class that’s running laps through the tall windows that sit on either side of the door.

And he doesn’t miss the feeling of hot eyes burning over him through the glass—even before he catches sight of that hideous mullet, clinging with sweat to Keith’s face as he leads the group around the room—breathless and pink-cheeked just as he was yesterday in the pilot’s seat.

It isn’t until he finally pulls himself away from the sight of Keith’s milky, muscular thighs moving about in his gym shorts and drags himself into the locker room that he remembers that he’s supposed to hate Keith’s guts.

It’s annoying, to say the least, that he’s allowed his thoughts to get so clouded with lust and his overwhelming love for Shiro that he’s actually started to convince himself that Keith is anything but a cocky piece of shit. He should have flipped the bastard off when he’d seen him in the gym. He should have banged on the window and loudly announced to everyone around that  _ “Keith Kogane is a piece of shit who sneaks off to the Garrison’s hangars to fuck his boyfriend” _ . He should have ruined the bastard’s reputation. He should have done anything but what he actually ended up doing—standing there with that stupid look on his face as Keith had stared at him each time that he’d looped by, that handsome, stony expression never leaving his face no matter how much the fire behind his eyes had burned brighter and brighter.

Lance curses quietly, squeezing too much toothpaste onto the bristles of his toothbrush and shoving it roughly into his mouth. He brushes his teeth until his gums ache, as though cleaning himself for the first time after everything that happened yesterday might actually wash away all of the memories along with the grime.

He can hold onto Shiro’s serene smile and the way that he’d held him so gently in the pilot’s chair. He can allow himself to remember that gentle kiss and the feeling of those warm hands cupping his face. He can keep the way that Shiro made him feel—the gentle hum of his voice, the gorgeous upturning of his lips. He’ll hold those memories close to his heart, but everything else can disappear. He doesn’t want to think about the strange line of Keith’s lips as he’d hovered over them—the way that he’d only moved forward once Shiro had comforted him, and how he’d jerked to life as though his muscles hadn’t wanted him to move any further. He doesn’t want to distract himself by wondering what any of that could have meant.

And he wants to stop going over Keith’s voice in his head—complimenting him as though it were the most natural thing in the world between them, as though he’d been so comfortable saying something nice about Lance that he didn’t see any point in sandwiching it between a few insults for good measure.

This is all wrong, Lance tells himself. He was going to win Shiro’s heart fair and square. Falling for Keith too was not part of the plan.

He ignores the fact that stealing Shiro away hadn’t ever felt quite right either. It doesn’t matter. That’s not the real issue here.

The door to the locker room creaks open, but he ignores it, far too caught up in his mental battle to spare a greeting for whichever sorry loser might have gotten reprimanded by their commander as well.

Really, he tells himself, spitting out his toothpaste and turning on the sink, who the Hell does Keith think he is anyway? Harassing him in class, dragging poor Shiro into this sick game of his, leading Lance on this wild goose chase, only to force Shiro to drop the bomb on him that they’ve both been watching him and want him to—what? Join their degenerate trysts around the entire compound? Enlist in the _ “Keith and Shiro make their disgusting mark on every possible surface of the Galaxy Garrison”  _ regime? What kind of sicko does Keith think that he is, really?

“Cargo pilot, if you’re not gonna rinse out your mouth, stop wasting water.”

The familiar, blood-boiling voice is so close to his ear that his soul nearly leaps right out of his earthly body. He lets out a humiliating screech, wheeling around so quickly in his terror that he nearly slips and falls on the perpetually damp tile.

Keith cocks his head to the side, reaching out a helping hand to steady him that Lance promptly slaps away. His brows are raised into his messy hairline, sweat sheening on his skin and cheeks still a little flushed. He’s cradling his towel and his cadet uniform in his other arm, staring at Lance as though _ he’s _ the one who shouldn’t be in here right now.

“Aren’t you missing class?” He asks, so nonchalant and maddeningly cavalier that Lance wants to punch those stupid, perfectly shaped eyebrows right off of his infuriatingly handsome face.

“I got yelled at by Commander Dos Santos, he gave me a pass to come take a shower.”

Keith shrugs noncommittally, and Lance realizes just a little too late that he doesn’t have to answer to Keith. He doesn’t have to explain anything to him at all.

It’s absolutely none of his business, and frankly, he’s offended that Keith would even imply that he’d skip class just to come in here when it’s so close to the time when Keith would also be in here. He hates that Keith might have the idea that he even knows what his schedule is in the first place.

“W-wait,” he spits, grabbing Keith by the shoulder as he begins to turn away toward the shower, “And what the Hell are you doing in here?! You were just in gym— _ I saw you in there _ —so what, you just cut class right in the middle because a hot-shot like you shouldn’t be expected to run laps like the rest of us?!”

Keith’s brows lower and knit together. There’s a slight upturn of his lips that Lance barely notices in time.

“I finished them early, so I get to leave early. Why do you care anyway?”

There’s a brief moment of silence between them, as Lance’s heart clatters within his chest, and Keith continues staring at him, that horrible, sardonic grin only growing wider and cockier.

“Okay, whatever,” Keith says suddenly, just as Lance begins to sputter incoherently in his rage and indignation, “Come on. Gym is almost out. People are going to start coming in here.”

Lance isn’t entirely sure what he means by that, and he’s still too wrapped up in convincing himself that he doesn’t care what Keith does—that he only really asked because Keith was grilling him too—to argue as Keith grabs him by the arm and pulls him toward the showers.

Keith stops near the second one from the end—the same one that Lance remembers finding them in the first time—before letting go of his arm and setting down his things. He pulls his shirt over his head, revealing the tenseness of his milky muscles beneath—the firmness of his chest dipping down into a shallow belly, the pink nipples erect once they’re exposed to the cool air of the locker room—and Lance has a lot of trouble keeping himself from staring, swallowing down the growing lump in his throat as his thoughts swim back to yesterday for what must be the hundredth time since he woke up this morning.

Keith slides his gym shorts from his hips down to his ankles, throwing a disgruntled frown over his shoulder as he catches Lance watching the way that the perky globes of his ass flex when he reaches down to fetch them from the floor and toss them to the side.

“Are you just gonna stand there, or…?”

Lance stares at him, dumbfounded. He’s so blindsided by everything that’s happened within the span of the last minute and a half that he’s rooted to the ground.

Keith rolls his eyes.

“Okay, fine. You’re just as bad as Shiro.”

With a sigh that Lance can only describe as “grouchy”, Keith moves toward him, reaching forward and beginning to undo the buttons of his uniform jacket.

He doesn’t know why he doesn’t push Keith away. He doesn’t know why he can only sit there, stiff in more places than he cares to admit, as Keith pulls open his jacket and slides it down his shoulders.

He gulps, trembling as the cool, humid air of the room hits his skin, raising bumps along his naked shoulders as Keith eases his undershirt from where it’s tucked into the waistband of his pants.

“I’m not untying your boots for you,” Keith grumbles, pausing to instruct Lance to raise his arms as he lifts his undershirt over his head, “It takes too long and it’s annoying.”

Lance nods dumbly, flinching as Keith drops to his knees and begins fiddling with his belt. The lofty grin that Keith shoots up at him makes his skin crawl.

“Already excited, cargo pilot? If you like this sort of thing so much, why’d you run away when we invited you last time?”

It’s the most that he’s ever heard Keith say since he met him, and it’s one-hundred percent filthy nonsense. But Keith’s voice is soft enough that it lulls him into a state of security that might be dangerous—it might be the sugary sweetness on the petals of a venus flytrap. It might be nothing short of a clever ruse to trick him into letting his guard down before Keith humiliates him in front of the entire locker room.

But there’s no one else even in here yet, and with a short glance at the clock above the sink, Keith begins tugging down his pants a little bit quicker.

“Hurry up,” he snaps, rising to his feet, “Class is going to let out soon.”

Lance nearly tips over as he bends down to untie his boots. Keith steadies him with a hand on his hip, which only makes him all-the-more mortified as he fumbles with the laces between clumsy fingers that just won’t quite work the way that he wants for them to.

Finally, after a torturous thirty seconds that feel like an eternity, he pulls back the final lace and leans against Keith—swallowing thickly and training his eyes on his feet, as though denial alone will allow him not to make an ass out of himself while Keith is so close and so warm and soft and _ naked _ —as he tugs his feet free from his boots and shakes his pants off of his ankles.

“Took you long enough,” Keith huffs, grabbing his boots and the rest of his things and tossing them into the pile of their other clothes with an echoey  _ ‘thump’ _ . “What, does your mom come all the way up here every day to tie your boots for you, cargo pilot?”

Lance’s face grows impossibly hot. He puffs out his cheeks and squares his shoulders, shoving away from Keith as he prepares himself for a (sweaty, naked) fight, but Keith grabs him by the wrist instead, dragging him closer to the shower and pulling open the curtain with his free hand. He turns the knob all the way up, holding his open palm beneath the sputtering spray until steam begins to rise from the water.

And finally, as the world around Lance blurs into nothing but his blood rushing in his ears and the feeling of his cock throbbing between his legs, Keith drags both of them inside and closes the curtain.

The water is scalding against his skin, and he shirks away from it at first, pressing his body as far into the corner as he can manage while Keith takes a moment to wet his hair under the spray. He watches Keith then, when he feels comfortable enough that Keith won’t notice it—with his eyes closed and his hands running through the tangles in his hair. He watches the way that the water runs in thick trails from his bangs around the straight bridge of his nose, how it collects in the divot above his lips before spilling out over them down to his chin.

He follows the water all the way down Keith’s throat, into the shallow cave of his collar bone, through the subtle lines of his chest—all the way down, then further down, until he’s taking in the way that it flattens out the small brush of hair just below Keith’s navel—and reminding himself, with a snap of his head up toward Keith’s closed eyes and a desperate skip of his heart, that he should have fought Keith yesterday instead of fucking him.

He should have made good on his promise to put an end to these maddening urges, instead of actually making them worse.

But Keith is still sitting here, completely exposed to him—eyes closed with the smallest of smiles curling up the corners of his lips. He’s standing beneath the stream of steamy water as though he doesn’t even understand how much Lance thinks about pummeling him—in more ways than one, Lance thinks, crossing his arms over his chest and flicking his eyes to the tiles on the floor. He feels like such a moron for playing right into Keith’s hand, for thinking so hard with his dick that he didn’t even realize how easy he was making it for Keith to ensnare him until it was entirely too late.

Maybe that’s okay though, he thinks. Wanting to do filthy things to him doesn’t mean that he has to marry the guy. It doesn’t mean that he has to tell Shiro that he wants the three of them to grow old and die together. He doesn’t have to include Keith in any of his life-long plans. He doesn’t have to think about the tiny twinges in his chest when he considers a life where he graduates from this place and never has to look at that unsightly mullet ever again.

He doesn’t have to think about anything, really, and he doesn’t, because Keith has reached around him to grab the body wash from the shallow notch in the shower wall, and before Lance can even gain his bearings from the sight of him so slippery and wet in the first place, he’s squirting a large portion of it into his hands and lathering it over his skin.

Lance makes a pitiful noise in the back of his throat, dropping back his head until it connects with the wall behind him. He trains his eyes on the body wash that Keith just put down, tells himself that he should start washing himself as well. He tries and fails to convince himself that he doesn’t care that Keith apparently dragged him in here to bathe together and  _ only _ bathe together. He ignores the way that his cock aches as his eyes trail guiltily to the small dip of Keith’s back into the firm roundness of that perfectly chiseled ass.

Keith still isn’t looking at him. He’s raising his arms to wash underneath them, so soapy and slick and so hard to resist. Lance doesn’t know what possesses him to reach forward. He doesn’t want to think about it. He doesn’t want to put a reason to any of this.

He just wants to touch Keith, to feel if he’s really as soft as he looks, and to remind himself of the heat that he’d found in Keith yesterday, that fire that had bled through the dark caverns of his eyes and under the surface of his skin. He’s playing with fire here—quite literally, he thinks, hating himself for thinking such a corny and cliched thought in the first place—but he can’t stop his fingers from coming forward and combing through Keith’s hair.

It’s soft—just like he’d thought that it would be. For a mere second, he’s reveling in the sensation of it wet between his fingers, wondering how he’d never considered how nice it might be to run his fingers through Keith’s hair during all of the times that he’d spent glaring at it.

But this inkling of romanticism is cut short a mere breath later, as Keith’s eyes snap open wide, and Lance doesn’t even have the time to contemplate why he flinches as though he’s been burned by a mere hand in his hair before he’s shoved roughly against the tile, Keith’s bony elbow stabbing hard into his throat.

“K— _ Keith _ —” he wheezes, lights dancing before his eyes as his head collides with the wall with a deafening crack. “K-Keith, wh- _ what the fuck _ ?”

Keith’s pupils are mere pinpricks, his brows low and knitted together. He’s glaring up at Lance with a wild expression, as though he’s been possessed by some kind of animal, thirsty for blood. He can feel Keith’s erratic pulse coursing through the wrist pressed firmly against his shoulder, his lips set in the same thin line from yesterday, his shoulders trembling so hard that Lance manages to suck in a few large gulps of air as he shakes.

After a long moment, Keith lets him free. He jerks his head back and forth, dragging in an uneasy breath and staring hard at the floor. Lance rubs at his throat, as though he might be able to alleviate the pain that Keith leaves there. Neither of them speak.

Finally, as the door to the locker room opens and the sound of Keith’s classmates talking fills up the space of their silence, Keith bites out the best explanation that Lance thinks he’s probably going to get.

“Sorry, I, uh…I wasn’t expecting for you to touch me.”

Lance watches the way that he shuffles uncomfortably, the stressed line in his shoulders never quite fading away. And he doesn’t think about what compels him to speak, or even to say the words that come tumbling awkwardly out of his mouth, but something about the way that Keith’s surprise bleeds through the iron cage of his facade, for the first time that Lance has ever witnessed, has pride tingling over his skin.

“Is…is it okay for me to touch you though? I-I mean, if you’re expecting it…is that okay?”

Keith turns toward him, and for whatever reason, he doesn’t even try to cover up all of the emotions that Lance sees dancing around in his expression. There’s a vulnerability that Lance finds in Keith that he never expected to see, a shock and a puzzling fear—as though he actually realizes that assaulting a guy in the shower who was just trying to touch his hair might have been kind of excessive.

“Do what you want,” Keith says flatly, but there’s color tinging his cheeks, “Just don’t pull my hair.”

Lance hadn’t even thought about ever pulling his hair until Keith mentions it, and he has to stop himself from trying it as he imagines all of the scenarios playing out in his head. He wonders if Keith would complain if he tried it more intimately—if he’d make those intoxicating noises again, if it would make him somehow even more aggressive.

His erection, shamefully, never fully went away, even as Keith pinned him against the wall. It only grows harder as he lets his thoughts wander into dirtier and dirtier territory.

Keith continues washing the suds from his skin, but Lance doesn’t miss the tiny, eager glances that he keeps sending in his direction. He wonders if Keith has ever lashed out at Shiro in the same way, and if he was just as eager back then to move away from it once he’d calmed down. He wonders if Shiro even understands why something so simple could elicit such a strong reaction in the first place, but he doesn’t linger on that thought for too long.

Keith peeks at him again, and eventually, Lance works himself up enough to actually make good on his request to touch him.

He shuffles gracelessly against the shower wall until he’s huddled a few inches from Keith’s back. It’s too crowded in here to move around without knocking elbows, and he takes a second to ponder how all three of them had possibly squeezed in here last time.

Carefully, he places one hand at Keith’s hip, reveling in how much softer it is than he could have ever imagined underneath all that taut, defined muscle. Keith throws a smoldering look over his shoulder beneath weighted eyelashes, and when he doesn’t make some crazy move to backhand him, Lance crawls his fingers up.

Keith looks away. His shoulders round forward.

He can’t hear the exhale Keith gives over the roar of the water, but he can feel it as his palm brushes over his chest. The skin under his exploring fingers is hot, slippery. Smooth and good smelling, despite the cheapness of the generic body wash. Lance feels a little more than light-headed as Keith subtly presses further back into him, until his backside is pushing on his groin. His hand stalls on teasing soap out of the ends of his hair.

There’s a few inches of height difference between them, but Lance hasn’t noticed just how decent the gap is until now, with the top of Keith’s head hitting at about his nose.

“This alright..?” Lance asks, lips at his ear, because Keith is tenser than he’s expected.

Keith replies with only a small bow of his head. Taking that to be probably as much confirmation as he’s going to get from someone as quiet as Keith apparently is in these situations, slowly, Lance draws a few circles over one still erect nipple. He wonders if the beating of water against them makes Keith just as sensitive as he tends to get underneath the nozzle.

The pinkness settled over Keith’s ears is tempting, so Lance draws the skin there between his teeth, testing with a lap of his tongue. Little by little, the tension is drawing away from his shoulders. He’s close enough now he can hear the sigh that pushes from between Keith’s lips—something satisfied and breathy enough it has his cock twitching to attention.

He isn’t so sure if he’s hitting enough erogenous zones to get Keith riled up in the same way Shiro probably could, but he likes to imagine he isn’t doing half bad, if the way Keith lets his head fall back onto his shoulder is any indication.

When Lance draws his fingers down away from his nipples, a zigzagging line more towards his navel where that curious happy trail lies, Keith says something. It’s so soft that Lance has to prompt him to repeat himself, and strain in to hear his response.

“You’re going too slow,” Keith hisses impatiently, wriggling his ass against his crotch, “Just touch me already, it’s not that serious.”

Annoyance rises back through the blood rushing fast in his veins. Lance wonders if this is the kind of bullshit Shiro has to deal with all the time. The guy must have the patience of a saint.

“I’m getting to it, Mullet, just  _ relax _ ,” Lance mumbles into his skin, glad Keith can’t see the abashed look that’s probably resting on his face.

Not two seconds ago, he’d managed to pull a pretty nice noise from him. He thought he’d been doing well, but perhaps he jumped the gun again. Lance doesn’t understand what the issue is here.

To be perfectly honest, though, he’s fairly nervous when he breaches past that fine bundle of hair and closes a loose fist around a surprisingly eager erection. Blood pounds in his ears. He’s barely aware that the water hitting his skin is beginning to taper off to more lukewarm.

Keith makes a huffy, indignant sound when he brushes lightly up his length. Lance doesn’t want to hear anymore bitching, so without thinking much of it, he sinks his teeth into his neck. The reaction that follows isn’t what he was expecting, but he sure as hell isn’t about to complain as Keith shudders and gives a soft, choking sort of cry.

It’s hard to read Keith other than through the way his body folds into him. It’s a bit strange like this, with Keith turned away from him. Lance wishes he could see his face, see what sort of expression might be lying there. He wants to find something sitting within the lines of his face that he can properly gloat about. He wants to be able to describe to Shiro in graphic detail about how desperate and needy he became under his exploring hands.

Groaning at the thought, Lance finds some relief in rubbing himself against the cleft of those pert, rounded cheeks. The water reduces the friction in a different way than lubrication, but it definitely isn’t a bad feeling at all.

Lance is just trying to figure out if Keith’s purposefully trying to annoy him by acting like he isn’t as into this as he obviously is, when Keith whips around before he can even work up the courage to begin stroking him.

“You’re taking too long, the water’s going to get cold,” Keith explains with little emotion, like he’s talking about a homework assignment, and promptly drops to his knees, “I hate cold water, so just let me handle it this time.”

He shakes his head of the damp strands tangled between his teeth and dripping over his reddened cheeks. Lance’s heart thunders in his chest when Keith turns those piercing, dark, hooded eyes up toward him.

He isn’t gentle when he slams Lance’s hips flush against the wall to hold him still, but Lance finds that he doesn’t have to be. His cock jerks and throbs, clearly okay with it in a way that Lance isn’t so sure is normal. It’s aching maybe even more so than it does when he’s imagining his Hollywood-level romances with Shiro, touching him tenderly and kissing him softly within satin sheets, rose petals littered around them as their sweaty bodies tangle lovingly together. All while Shiro whispers sweet, sweet nothings into his ear.

But he’s with Keith now, and he’s a fool for assuming that anything even halfway similar could come from someone who’s looking at him with a predatory, almost aggressive spark resting in his pupils. Lance knows Keith isn’t down there to buy him flowers, or to use that cocky mouth to whisper sweet nothings.

That sharp grin tugging up his lips is around him in seconds flat, before Lance can comprehend the change in atmosphere, picking up from the slow tempo they’ve had going and turning into something much more desperate and frantic.

Lance squawks an unattractively high-pitched noise as Keith swallows around him. His mouth is too tight, warm and wet in all the right ways, and much better than the rough callouses of Keith’s fingers or the touch of his own hand. Lance can’t even imagine how Shiro must feel when he does this to him, because his mouth seems barely big enough to take in his average length. As if sensing his thoughts, on cue, Keith wraps one hand around the base, which he can’t manage to fit entirely inside.

Lance can’t stop his fingers from tangling into his hair, but he keeps his wits about him, and respects Keith’s wishes not to pull it. Keith hums appreciatively, low in his throat, when he tentatively scratches his scalp instead. The vibration hits right when he’s pulling up over the head of his cock.

It takes everything in Lance to not scream, and he claps his free hand over his mouth, because he really can’t trust himself not to. There’s the laughter and chattering of boys filtering from nearby in the changing room, the spraying of other showers turning on. The setting is anything but romantic or intimate, but the ground falls out from under him, and it’s just him and Keith wrapped in the steam and fog.

Cool water beats down upon them. Keith shifts forward and back, sucking harshly, his fingernails digging crescents into Lance’s thighs.

Lance jerks wildly, hips bucking when he suddenly hits the back of Keith’s throat. He doesn’t have the time to feel bad for the way Keith chokes a little, because he’s coming before he can form any sort of warning words from his lips.

When his vision stops blurring, he still feels about as embarrassed about it as he did yesterday. The hazy afterglow, however, is a small blanket of comfort.

“S-sorry,” Lance gasps out, moving to clutch at the slick tile to steady his wobbling knees, “I didn’t mean to, y-you know...it just happened so fast…”

Keith slips off him with a lewd pop, but his lips remain pursed together. Lance will swear, when he recounts the story to tell Shiro at a later time, that his heart literally stopped for a good, solid minute there.

Because Keith only silently tilts his head up to him, cheeks full with cum, and swallows like it’s the most natural thing for him to do. “‘S okay,” he murmurs, “You taste good.”

“Shit,” Lance breathes, letting himself slide down the wall, to the cold, hard tile beneath him.

He takes in a few staggered breaths, watching the flush steadily rise into Keith’s cheeks. For a few moments, Lance centers himself by focusing on the water rolling down the drain, before casting his gaze back to Keith.

Keith is licking his lips clean, before he settles with biting them. He sits back so that his heels are resting on the backs of his thighs. He looks a little lost, a little uncertain. The complaints about cold water are mysteriously dropped.

It’s sort of...cute, Lance thinks, cursing himself immediately for thinking such a thing. Pulling air back into his lungs, Lance creeps forward, reaching to try and wrap his hand around the painfully neglected erection between Keith’s thighs.

But Keith jerks away from his outstretched hand. There’s something strange there, something akin to panic in his eyes as he abruptly stands instead.

“I-I’ve got to go,” he says quietly, looking away and down, as if there’s some invisible watch around his wrist restricting their time, “I’m probably going to be late for my next class.”

Lance stares dumbly as he backs up and pushes the curtain aside without another word.

Before he can even think of what to say, Keith is already gone.


	10. The Garrison Hath No Fury Like a Lance Scorned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith keeps running away.

For a very long time, Lance does nothing.

He shivers under the spray of icy water, wondering idly what sort of plumbing system they must have installed here as no one complains about a lack of warmth in the stalls around him—or even more pressing, how no one possibly noticed that Keith had left their stall with the water still running, frazzled and aroused and looking at a stupid, imaginary watch as he’d thrown random excuses back behind the curtain. He listens to the racket of his heartbeat, feels the heated prickles of Keith’s fingerprints fading away gradually from his thighs.

He sits still for what feels like it might be an entire lifetime, or maybe just a single intake of breath. Time is a confusing, intangible thing as he feels the cold water washing away the remaining warmth of his orgasm.

And the rage comes belatedly, like waves crashing into the shore. It hits him all at once, until he’s drowning in it, wondering why Keith can never allow him to do anything without showing him up, why he always has to steal away his fleeting chances to shine before he can even hope to wrap his fingers around them.

He’d been managing just fine back then. He’d been drawing those pretty little noises out of Keith as though it was the most natural thing in the world. He’d touched Keith in a way that he’d never imagined was possible—running his fingers over the smooth expanse of that milky skin, tracing the shallow lines of muscle, taking in all of the hidden parts of him that Lance had only caught glimpses of until that very moment.

He’d been acutely aware of the wild thrumming of Keith’s heart then—erratic and uncertain and so in sync with Lance’s own fitful pulse that he’d pondered, for a single second, if they were really so different after all.

He’d felt as though he was truly beginning to find his place in Keith’s heart, as well as in Shiro’s. He’d felt tethered to them in that moment as he’d never truly felt connected to anything else in his life. He’d thought, for an achingly short amount of time, that maybe this wasn’t such a ridiculous idea after all.

Maybe it could work out—the three of them together. Maybe they could find a way to come together and have any semblance of a real relationship, if Keith was willing to let his guard down so easily. Maybe the idea of getting old and dying together wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe, if Keith was willing to trust him, things wouldn’t be as rocky as he’d originally thought.

But for whatever reason, Keith had clammed up again, straightening his shoulders, hitching his breath, and taking control of a situation that Lance was more than capable of taking care of himself. He feels like a toddler again, like a child too stupid and clumsy to pour his own glass of milk or fold his own clothes. He feels the same way that he used to when he would try to do something “grown-up” as a kid, when his mom would promptly take that power away from him by doing it herself—innocently, he knows, and completely well-meaning, but he feels just as railroaded now as he used to back then.

He feels just as incompetent and silly, just as robbed of his chances to grow and thrive as an adult. He feels incapable and useless, as though somehow, Keith had peered inside of him and figured out just how undeserving he was of ever getting a chance to prove himself.

He knows that Keith can’t possibly understand how it feels to grow up without the autonomy to take care of himself. He’s sure that Keith’s been managing on his own just fine ever since he was a kid. He gets the sense that Keith doesn’t exactly come from a close-knit family—if the rumors are even remotely true, maybe doesn’t even have one at all—and maybe Keith just doesn’t have the capacity to understand that sometimes, you need to allow someone to do their best before you shove them aside and do it for them.

That thought doesn’t make him feel any better. He’s never been very good at seeing things from other people’s point of view.

As it is, he grapples with all of the feelings building up inside of him. The old insecurities and the fresh wounds still sting all the same. He doesn’t know if Keith meant to hurt his feelings or not. His head isn’t even remotely clear enough to make sense of just about anything right now.

When he hears the last of Keith’s classmates leaving the locker room—their laughter bouncing around on the walls as the door clicks closed behind them—he finally allows himself to rise from his spot on the floor, reaching forward with unsteady hands and turning off the water. He feels numb just about everywhere. His knees tingle with the needle-prick of sensation flowing back into them again. His hair is so weighed down with water that it’s running in thick trails down his face, and when he steps out of the shower and shakes his head, it patters in small puddles on the floor.

He feels a little bad for the janitor at times like these, but with a thick gulp, he reminds himself that Keith didn’t leave him much of a mess to clean up.

The anger ebbs away, replaced by arousal, and the arousal is drowned out by more rage. His emotions bleed out over each other, an ugly stain growing larger and larger in his head and driving a long needle of self-doubt straight down into his heart. He doesn’t even know how many classes he’s missed at this point. He doesn’t even have the strength to worry about getting in trouble for losing too much time.

This is exactly why he’d told himself not to get caught up with someone like Keith in the first place. He lets out a short, humorless bark of a laugh. He doesn’t even have the strength to hate himself for not being smart enough to take his own advice.

He feels a little bit like the statue that he always imagines Keith to be—wonders with anger if Shiro is the only person capable of breathing life into him and allowing him to feel. Shiro is safe, he tells himself. He’s understanding and warm. Shiro knows how to reach into someone even as prickly as Keith and find something worth cherishing inside.

He doesn’t like tainting his feelings for Shiro with this sort of bitterness, and he hates Keith even more for forcing his thoughts to venture down such dangerous territory. Why couldn’t the bastard just sit still and accept a fucking handjob? Why does he always have to make things so complicated? How does he know exactly which buttons in Lance to push, and why does he have so little self-control that he can never stop himself from punching all of them at once?

Lance curses under his breath, rubbing his hair excessively rough with his towel, as though drying himself off thoroughly will rid him of this aggravating train of thought.

He’s cussing up a quiet storm as he yanks on his clothes. He didn’t sign up for this. He didn’t ask for this! He just wanted to have a fun experience at an elite military school! He just wanted to lock eyes with the dreamy senior officer and maybe make out with him a little bit! He didn’t need to get tangled up in Keith’s fucked up web. He didn’t need to find himself falling so hard into this endless abyss of mindgames and unsettling emotional eccentricities that are apparently a very deeply-ingrained part of Keith’s general vibe.

He just wanted to fondle his new boyfriend in the shower. He just wanted to enjoy the softness of Keith’s skin. He wanted to draw out those cute noises and drink them in, to reassure himself that he really did have something to offer in a relationship when his experience with this sort of thing is so embarrassingly bleak.

He jerks his head toward the clock. He’s running late for his last class. With a final breathy curse and the squeak of his boots dragging over the wet floor, he decides that he can skip one last time.

He knows that Keith has study hall last period. He knows that Shiro gets out early for the day.

He’d seen them huddled up in the library by the window before, days earlier, when he still had no idea what sorts of deranged things were going on between them.

Keith’s asskicking is long overdue, he tells himself. He’s too haughty now, thinking that Lance has forgotten about it. His anger flares up again as he thinks of all of the other poor bastards who might want to take a shot or two at Keith as well—for always being such an arrogant asshole in class, for keeping Shiro all to himself, for leading them on, only to leave them at the last second.

It’s time for retribution. It’s time to show Keith that his actions have consequences, that there are real people in the world aside from himself—who hurt and love just like he does, who have feelings just like he should, who don’t like being toyed with and pushed around just because Keith doesn’t have enough sense not to ruin everything just when it’s starting to get good.

It’s time to show Keith exactly who he’s been messing with here.

 

* * *

 

There’s something about Keith today that doesn’t sit well with Shiro.

They’re sitting in their usual spot near the back of the library, bathed in the yellow light of the sun filtering through the wide windows overlooking the courtyard. Keith had shuffled in a few minutes behind schedule, which, while it wasn’t a big deal, was already fairly strange for such a strictly punctual person.

He hadn’t wanted to pry, so he’d kept his worries to himself, but now—as Keith hunches his shoulders and only replies to Shiro’s small inquiries about his day with huffy non-answers—he wonders if something might actually be wrong.

He’s familiar with the way that Keith tends to fold in on himself when things get too hard to handle. There’s the silence first, he remembers, shortly followed by the rage. His fuse is phenomenally short during times like these, when he’s baring his prickly spine to the world like an angry hedgehog, warning predators to stay away. Shiro knows better than anyone that he isn’t afraid to lash out if someone pushes him too hard.

With a soft sigh and a pinch of his fingers around the bridge of his nose, Shiro tells himself that maybe he should stay out of this for once.

By the way that Keith had dodged his questions about Lance (“Did he say anything to you in class?” he’d asked all-too innocently, before Keith had shot him a look as though he’d just asked what color of panties he was wearing beneath his uniform), he’s sure that something happened between them—and this thought alone convinces him that whatever issue they have with each other is way above his pay-grade.

He focuses instead on actually reading the words on the flight manual in front of him, his fingers bunching up the corners of the pages in his frustration. He feels useless now, just as he always does when Keith is going through something that he still doesn’t trust him enough to explain, but he knows that giving Keith some space to cool off really is the best thing for him right now.

When they were kids, he would always pester Keith far too much when it was obvious that something was wrong. Keith would be curled inward, barely willing to speak to him at all. Sometimes it was a black eye, a blood stain, a long tear in his usual oversized t-shirt that would never look the same after his mom repaired it, but he’d deny that anything had happened no matter how many times Shiro pressed the issue. He’d close up then, forging together the metal doors of his heart, hiding away all of those vulnerabilities deep inside of himself, for no one to ever know about but himself.

It had been disheartening back then, to watch him suffer in self-imposed solitude. Shiro had struggled with the idea that he could never truly mend a person if they weren’t willing to open up first. But he’d grown in time to respect Keith’s silence, to allow him to overcome these obstacles in his own way without trying too hard to save him.

Keith would come around when he was ready, every time. And Shiro knows that it’s better to wait for him to decide when he’s ready to talk. It’s better to give him room to cool off.

It’s smarter, in the long run, to give him space when it’s evident that he’s looking for the first excuse to fight.

Lance, however, hasn’t been with them long enough to get that memo.

Really, he should consider writing a few manuals for future reference—about the sorts of things that make Keith pull away, how that small moment of embarrassment and nervousness yesterday shouldn’t have caused Lance any alarm, or how sometimes Keith just isn’t exactly willing to take as much as he’s willing to give—because maybe that would solve a lot of these problems before they get the chance to fully flourish.

Maybe, then, Lance wouldn’t be crashing into the Garrison library like a bull rampaging after the shake of a red scarf. Maybe then, their days could be filled with a lot more love and a lot less war.

As it is, he’s been far too busy to spend his time remembering all of Keith’s ticks, after spending so much time getting used to them. Lance is still stomping over to them, waving a hand at the librarian as he tells him softly to be quiet. He’s visibly shaking with rage, the tips of his ears so pink that Shiro can perfectly envision the cartoonish smoke billowing out of them.

He stops just under a foot away from their table, as though a force-field has miraculously materialized around them and he can’t bring himself to move any further.

Keith, Shiro notices, makes a point of not looking up from his book, even though they all know very well that he’s hyper-sensitive enough that he’d probably heard Lance yelling all the way down the hall. He continues to flip moodily through his textbook, and as Shiro’s eyes flick nervously between them, he can tell that his nonchalance is only making Lance angrier.

Lance’s fists are shaking at his sides. There’s a stiff, angry line to his shoulders, his spine bent upward like an angry cat rearing for a fight. And finally, after he seems to have collected himself enough to speak, he thrusts a single, accusatory finger in Keith’s direction.

“What the fuck is your problem, Mullet?!”

Shiro raises an eyebrow, his gaze straying back to Keith’s unreadable face. He’s nibbling on the end of his pen, leaning forward slightly to color in a random answer bubble on his homework. If Shiro didn’t know any better, he’d think that Keith hadn’t heard Lance at all.

But people are staring at them now, craning their necks around the bookshelves to get a better look at what all of the yelling is about. The librarian continues to threaten to call a higher up, in a tense, dreadful hiss that sends a shot of anxiety straight through his chest. Shiro sits up a little straighter in his seat, planting on his most comforting smile.

Apparently, he was wrong. With Keith doing nothing but getting Lance more riled up, the task of taking care of this is shifted onto his shoulders.

Keith is definitely going to have to pay him back for this later. The thought of _how_ is the only thing that allows him to swallow his pride and his embarrassment long enough to turn toward Lance and attempt to calm him down.

“Hey, Lance, buddy, I’m sure Keith didn’t mean anything by it, uh—why don’t you sit down and we can talk this out—”

“He knows for a goddamn fact that what he did was a dirty fucking trick! Did you really think that you could fool me, Mullet?! You don’t even have a class after gym! I’m not an idiot, you know!”

He’s flailing his hands around wildly. Shiro can see the librarian reaching for the phone to call security, surely, behind him. People are whispering now, crowding around and peeking at them through the gaps in the bookshelves. He hasn’t seen Keith fight anyone in a very long time, but if this keeps up, he has a sinking feeling that Keith might be breaking his perfect school record just to lay Lance out flat for causing such a scene.

Just as he’s standing up to physically _force_ Lance to be quiet, he can hear the quiet tap of Keith’s book closing. A small, aggravated sigh, the sensation of Keith’s eyes dragging up from the table and rolling over his back toward Lance.

“Can you keep it down, cargo pilot? People are trying to study in here.”

All of the color drains from Lance’s face within seconds. He risks a look behind him, lowering his arms slowly and swallowing hard as all of their onlookers avert their eyes.

“I don’t even get what your problem is,” Keith continues, and Shiro can feel the flames of his eyes burning holes through both of them, “You got what you wanted. So what’s the issue here?”

Lance points more weakly this time, his form wilted and shoulders low. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, a small inkling of pinkness still staining his cheeks. Shiro puts an awkward, comforting hand on his arm, far too out of the loop to truly figure out who he should be siding with here. He has a few ideas, of course—by Lance’s squawking and Keith’s determination to avoid the issue entirely—but he tries to reserve his judgement until the very end when someone like Keith is involved.

He’s always had a knack for surprises, after all.

Lance’s voice is so feeble and squeaky that Shiro worries that Keith might have done some sort of irreparable damage. He can feel the air displacing behind him as Keith rises from his seat.

“I—” Lance bites off the end of that sentence, knitting his brows together and glaring down between his feet, “You know what you did. I don’t—I don’t have to explain anything to you.”

Keith brushes past both of them, but Shiro doesn’t miss the stiffness in his gait, the straight line of his back leading up into his shoulders in a very purposefully-manufactured show of confidence. Over his shoulder, he says, “If you’re going to come, come. I’m not sticking around until security shows up.”

Which is a good idea, Shiro realizes, gathering his manual and his notes from the table before shoving them into his bag. He slings it over his shoulder, placing his palm on Lance’s back and leading him away as well.

The librarian is muttering hurriedly on the phone.

It’s going to take a lot of explaining to make this go away, he can already feel it. But as he slowly begins to catch up to Keith, and Lance begins to thaw out next to him, he reminds himself that there are far more interesting things than endless piles of paperwork to be taken away from this whole ordeal.

Like the sight of Keith, truly embarrassed, as he leads them out into the hall and toward the roof—or Lance, fumbling desperately with the accusations that he’s still throwing at Keith’s back, blissfully unaware of the new feelings that he’s awakened in Shiro’s oldest, dearest friend.

 

* * *

 

Shiro is laughing, and while it’s a beautiful, ethereal sound that sends pleasurable shivers skittering over his skin, Lance can’t shake the aggravation the crawls up his spine as a result of it.

They’re sitting together on the roof now—Shiro having slid his security card in the slot by the door to give them access to a place usually off-limits to regular students—and Lance is stumbling through the explanation for his outburst in the library, from his cross-legged position against the wall. It makes him feel like a kid once again, trying to talk his way out of getting in trouble for pulling some girl’s hair in class. As though somehow, long ponytails brushing over his desk relentlessly or useless assholes ditching him before his orgasm even had the chance to fade away completely are perfectly excusable offenses that deserve no restitution.

He starts by mentioning that he’d missed class, explaining in great detail how he hadn’t had the time to wash his hair or brush his teeth. He spends an excessive amount of time after that talking about his usual bathing habits, suddenly painfully aware of the fact that telling Shiro everything that went down between Keith and himself in the locker room is a lot more mortifying than imagining that he’s doing it.

Shiro isn’t similar to his friends back home in the least. He doesn’t brag about which girls he went out with over the weekend. He doesn’t croon about stealing alcohol from his parents’ liquor cabinet or sneaking out past curfew to go to some random college party. Lance realizes entirely too late that Shiro probably isn’t going to high-five him for managing to fondle Keith in the shower—and really, he isn’t even too sure that his buddies back in Cuba would’ve been too enthusiastic about it either.

He’s not going to laugh at him for getting upset either, surely, but once Lance starts realizing that he’s going to have to talk about his sexual desires for Keith out loud, _right in front of him_ , he’s far less articulate than he’d like to be.

Shiro watches him thoughtfully for the longest time, nodding at the right intervals, asking how certain things made him feel, until he reaches the part of the story that he’s suddenly far too humiliated to even recount.

It takes him a few tries to find the right words. Shiro is patient, prompting him gently, telling him that there are no secrets too big between lovers that they won’t forgive.

But it’s not that, really, because Keith knows this story already. The bastard was right in the middle of it—the cause of it, even! It’s more about Shiro’s serene smile, the way that he leans his elbows on his knees and dips forward, as though Lance’s stupid complaints are really worth his undivided attention. It’s the idea that he’s allowed himself to get so worked up over Keith being the inconsiderate asshole that he always is, instead of spending his time pursuing the only person in their triad who actually seems to give a damn about anyone other than himself.

He feels silly, and petty, but finally, he relents.

He explains with quivering anger how Keith had taken off right as he’d reached out to touch him. Keith is sitting with his back to the roof’s ledge, one arm slung over the side as he watches the sun bleeding out into the horizon with a morose glower. When Lance manages to bite out the words, when he finally composes himself long enough to swallow his rage and explain that Keith had left him when he was so eager to please him too—that’s when Shiro begins to laugh.

Lance feels scandalized immediately. His thoughts race so quickly past him that he barely has the chance to contemplate everything that’s happening. Shiro raises a hand in the air, apologizing with that same considerate smile. And curiously enough, when Lance’s gaze dips down to Keith beside him, still staring out into the sky, he looks so flustered that Lance has a hard time convincing himself that it’s even the same Keith.

“I’m sorry, Lance.” Shiro clears his throat, reaching down to clap a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “I’m not laughing at you, I promise. It’s just… some things never change. I really am sorry, I should have warned you.”

Keith is glaring the sharpest of daggers in Shiro’s direction now, and it’s another first, seeing Keith look at him with anything but utmost adoration.

“Shiro,” he warns, but Shiro doesn’t listen. He laughs again, sliding his hand along Keith’s back and dragging him closer.

“He gets kind of finicky about these things sometimes. You didn’t do anything wrong. Honestly, if he was so embarrassed that he took off that quickly, you must have done something very _right_.”

It’s a lot to take in. Lance’s eyes flick from Keith’s cherry-red cheeks to Shiro’s charming grin, wondering if this is one of those old riddles that he used to read as a kid—where one guy tells only the truth, and the other’s… just a really grumpy piece of shit most of the time.

“Shiro,” Keith’s warnings drop down another octave. He’s so bundled up and stiff in Shiro’s grasp that it seems as though he might spring away at any moment.

“He did the same thing the first time that he kissed me, you know. I wasn’t even sure what was going on until—”

Keith lurches forward as though he’s going to claw his way out of Shiro’s arms, but it seems to Lance that Shiro’s become experienced enough with this sort of situation that he was already anticipating it. He holds onto Keith tighter, more laughter bubbling out of him as Keith begins reprimanding him in short, breathless hisses.

“I didn’t run away because I was embarrassed!” he grinds out between his helpless struggles for freedom, “I ran away because I was like _twelve_ and I’d never kissed anyone before! Stop acting like everything I do has to mean something—”

He flounders as Shiro readjusts his grip to let him free, falling forward into a crumpled pile on the ground before hurriedly pulling himself up.

He strides a few feet away, wiping imaginary dust from his clothes and sending both of them a series of varying, dirty looks.

“I left because I was going to be late to the library. It was nothing personal, cargo pilot. Stop getting all worked up over it.”

Lance can’t even bring himself to get angry now—even though the _“cargo pilot”_ nickname started getting old the first time that Keith used it, and even though he knows that lateness had to have been the last thing on Keith’s mind when he’d pulled away from Lance has though he was going to hurt him. Shiro’s words swirl around in his head. He thinks about how Shiro must have felt when Keith ran away from him when they were kids—how many years it must have taken before he’d realized exactly why Keith always pulled away when he was only trying to hold him closer.

Everything makes a lot more sense to him now, as Shiro leans back against the edge of the roof and Keith continues glaring at them from a little ways away. It makes sense, but still…

It doesn’t stop him from wanting to finish what Keith started in the shower.

His mother always told him growing up, _“People don’t always know your story. If you do something bad to them while you’re hurt, you still need to make up for it.”_

And he imagines that she was talking more about yelling at his older sister after he’d had a bad day at school, or throwing a tantrum in class when they hadn’t served his favorite kind of pudding, but it resonates with him regardless.

“Keith,” he says slowly, tipping back his head to watch the way that Keith paces slightly from the side of the building to the ledge, “You still have to let me pay you back. This doesn’t change anything.”

Keith stares at him then, owl-eyed and exasperated. After a short moment where their eyes lock together and it takes everything inside of Lance not to look away, Keith shoves his hands in his pockets, shoulders squared as he storms toward the door.

“Fuck off.”

Shiro says something softly, something about being nice and not leaving like this, but Keith is still fiddling with the handle. In his anger, he seems to have forgotten that Shiro is the only one who can let them back inside.

The cogs begin to turn in Lance’s head as Keith curses lowly and kicks weakly at the door. Shiro is watching him, a small, poignant smile tugging up the sides of his lips even now. There’s a nervous energy popping in the air, and Lance doesn’t know if he’s the only one who can feel it, but when Shiro turns to send him an apologetic look, he knows exactly what he needs to do.

“Fine,” he sighs, scooting forward on his butt to get closer to Shiro, “If I can’t mess around with you, I guess I’ll just have to mess with Shiro instead!”

Keith’s back is facing him now, his hand resting limply against the handle of the door. Lance doesn’t miss the stress that bundles up between his shoulders. He doesn’t miss the way that he twitches at the words as though his curiosity has been successfully piqued.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have any clue what I’m doing, so, _maybe_ … if you want to make things right, you’ll help me out?”

He rests his weight against Shiro’s side, and Shiro doesn’t argue. If anything, he seems all-too eager to wrap his arms around him and tuck his head under his chin. Keith still isn’t looking at them, but his hand slides down from the handle and rests at his side.

There’s silence between them for a few thundering heartbeats, in which Lance prays that Keith will take the bait this time without thinking about it too hard, and Shiro holds him closer as though he might be thinking the same thing.

“Fine.” Keith’s voice is low and gravelly. Down below in the courtyard, Lance can hear Commander Hendrick instructing a group of students through a drill. “If it’ll get you to shut up, I guess… I’ll help.”

Lance’s resulting smile is so wide that his cheeks ache. He never thought that anything could make him quite as happy as Keith agreeing to stay, or that smoldering look burning in the coals of his eyes as he finally turns around to face them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there! I just wanted to pop in and mention that next week, I’m gonna be taking a very short break from updating this story (and also my other story, but this is probably the only one that actually matters in these notes, haha)! Starting tomorrow, I have a fairly busy schedule, so it’s just not realistic to promise a new chapter when I might not even be home! I’m running a 5k, celebrating three birthdays, then there’s the new vld season, and an assortment of other things that all kind of ended up falling on the same week. 
> 
> So I hope you guys can forgive me! I promise that posting with resume on 10/20, as usual! So thank you so much, as always, for keeping up with this story! See you guys next time!


	11. The Folly of Keith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things start to get weird on the Galaxy Garrison rooftop.

After a little bit of shuffling and Keith ordering everyone around, Shiro ends up sitting on the ledge of the roof—a nervous smile spread out over his lips as he peeks behind him to the courtyard below—with Lance and Keith, side by side, on their knees between his legs.

Keith is drawing his open palm over the wide expanse of Shiro’s muscular thighs through his uniform pants, his eyes dancing with a mischievous sort of need that knots heat deep in Lance’s belly. Tentatively, Lance begins to follow his lead, flicking his gaze up to meet Shiro’s, flushing deeply at the reassurance that he finds there.

Shiro is watching the two of them as though he’s living in a dream. His eyes are wide, pupils blurred into the dark gray of his irises, teeth digging down into his quivering bottom lip. He twitches when Keith’s fingers hint at the edge of the growing bulge behind his fly, quivers beneath their hands and lets out a long, staggered breath through his nose as Lance tries doing the same.

They’re not exactly competing, Lance knows, but he can’t help but feel the need to outshine Keith rising like steam in his chest. He wants Shiro to realize that he’s just as capable of making him feel good as Keith is—and really, maybe even more so, if he says so himself. He’s experienced the rough feel of Keith’s calloused fingers clawing into his skin. He knows the way that Keith likes to bite and pull, to push him further and further toward threshold between pain and pleasure—precarious and dangerous in his utter disregard for what might not hurt in just the right way.

Sure, Keith’s aggressiveness really gets  _ him _ going, even more so, at times, than Shiro’s tender, loving touch. Even thinking about it now has his cock straining painfully hard in the tight confines of his uniform pants, begging for the drag of those blunted nails against his skin, the sharp pressure of fingers digging hard into his thighs—but that’s not the point. Shiro is a romantic, refined kind of guy. He’s the kind of guy who you bring home to mom, take to church Sunday morning. He’s a wine and dine sort of date, a treasure so precious that he needs to be treated with the utmost tenderness and respect that he deserves.

And yeah, he knows that Shiro got off just fine with Keith pulling his hair—that it seemed as though he was enjoying himself with all of that slipping and sliding and desperate moaning that was going on when he’d stumbled in on them in the shower. But that means nothing, really, because Shiro loves Keith, and he’s far too lenient with him than someone like Keith really deserves. He puts up with being pushed around and roughed up. He accepts that meanness as a simple quirk of Keith’s character.

But Lance knows that he, himself, can be gentle. He can be romantic. He can be the guy who lays Shiro down softly on a bed of roses, kissing every inch of that silky-smooth skin, holding him and loving him just as tenderly as a true gift to mankind that Shiro is. He’ll leave Keith in his dust here. He’ll surpass him how he’d never managed to in the simulator, or the locker room, or hiding in the shadows of that practice ship in the hangar. He’ll show them both, once and for all, that he has something to offer this threesome that neither of them could ever hope to comprehend.

He’ll be firm with Keith. He’ll make him own up to all of his shitty behavior. He’ll teach him to stop ditching out right when things are starting to get interesting, and to respect his partner's needs and wants to take care of him as well. He’ll be so soft and so kind to Shiro that he’ll never want to sleep with anyone else ever again.

He’s so caught up in his inner-monologue that he doesn’t even notice that Keith is pulling open Shiro’s pants until that monstrous erection is leaping out between their faces. Shiro lets out a gravely, breathless laugh at the little squawk that tumbles out of Lance’s open mouth—reaches forward and combs an encouraging hand through his hair.

“You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do, Lance,” Shiro sighs, his brows low and his eyes glassy and dark, “You can stop any time that you want.”

He can feel Keith watching him too. His cheeks burn, his heart pounding fast and climbing from his chest into his throat. He doesn’t know why those words embarrass him so much, why he feels as though it might be more of a challenge than a reassurance, even though he knows perfectly well that Shiro would never dream of antagonizing him like that.

It might be the way that he _ just knows _ that Keith is smirking at him—how he’s sure that he’d never live it down in Keith’s mind if he backed down now.

And… maybe Keith really wouldn’t judge him, sure. Keith doesn’t seem too terribly worried about his inexperience, if he’s completely honest with himself. But maybe it’s the idea that the Keith who still exists inside of his imagination would definitely think less of him—the one so tall and far away, like a judgmental God forever watching him from the clouds, the fool’s gold at the end of his long journey of self discovery that he knows he can never hope to obtain. Maybe it’s just his own insecurities getting the better of him.

Honestly, he should probably consider why the mean voices in his head have suddenly taken the shape of Keith Kogane—why, it seems, that the one person who he doesn’t want to let down anymore is the bastard with the shit-eating smile and the ugliest hairstyle known to mankind. Maybe he should schedule an appointment with the Garrison’s councilor. Maybe he should think about checking out some psychology books from the library. But right now, those rude Keith voices buried deep in the back of his thoughts are telling him that he’s too much of a coward to reach forward and touch Shiro on his own. They’re saying that maybe he really can’t do this without Keith’s help after all.

They’re telling him, _ ‘They’re only including you because they feel sorry for you. If you mess this up again, how many more times do you think they’ll keep asking you to come back?’ _

The simmer of Keith’s stare has shifted away from his face to Shiro. He’s sitting here uselessly, allowing this chance to slip away. Shiro’s fingers are sliding through his still-damp hair—warm and soft and shuddering with excitement as he waits.

And finally, just as Keith makes to move forward, for once, Lance beats him to the punch.

He leans in, his heartbeat a racket in his ears, the world around him blurry and muted as he only concentrates on the feeling of his tongue prodding out to drag along the swollen head of Shiro’s erection, and the sounds—so low, so lovely—that grit through the tight cage of Shiro’s teeth.

Keith is watching him again. He tries not to let that trip him up. He swirls his tongue around the head, knitting his brows together in concentration. It tastes a lot more like nothing than he was expecting. It’s soft, he realizes, soft and warm. There’s a pulse under his tongue, pounding wildly. There’s the feeling of Keith shifting next to him, raising up a hand to wrap around the base of the shaft.

Shiro croaks out a curse, his fingers tightening in Lance’s hair, tugging feebly.

And Lance smiles. Electricity is coursing through his veins, his muscles moving on their own, his head so high in the clouds that he forgets about the grit of concrete digging into his knees, or the voices barking commands out in the courtyard below.

He opens his mouth wider, pushing in, taking as much of Shiro’s cock into his mouth as he can handle, until the tip of it hits a spot near the back of his throat that almost makes him gag.

“Easy, cargo pilot,” Keith croons, patting him on the back. He’s pulled his hand away just in time, laughing low and sultry in a way that has Lance’s own erection begging for attention. “Bit of an overachiever, aren’t you?”

Lance ignores him, pulling his head back, trying his hardest to emulate the way that Keith had pumped around him in the locker room shower. Shiro is so girthy that his jaw aches already. He doesn’t even make it halfway down the length of it before he runs out of room. He pauses for a moment to wonder how Keith’s small mouth might look stretched out and overwhelmed with this kind of girth. That thought alone causes a groan to rumble up his throat, humming over all of Shiro that he can fit beyond his lips.

Shiro is making the most wonderful of noises now, his head tipped back and his fingers digging so roughly into Lance’s scalp that he can feel a few hairs pulling out between his fingers.

“J-Jesus, Lance…” Shiro’s words hang in the air like smoke. Lance wishes that he could listen to them echoing around in his thoughts forever.

It’s getting harder to keep going with every bob of his head. He’s kneeling down awkwardly, most of his weight pressed into Shiro’s knee beneath his hand. Saliva is dribbling down his chin. He doesn’t even want to think about how he must look right now. His cheeks ache so badly that he pulls away within minutes.

But Shiro isn’t the one who reassures him, not how he’d expected. He’s already berating himself internally when Keith leans forward, eyes smoldering as they meet his from the other side of Shiro’s erection—dragging that devious tongue from the base all the way to the tip.

“There’s too much to take all at once,” Keith tells him—and it’s not that casual voice that Lance remembers from the last time that they messed around. There’s an undeniable need there now, hiding somewhere between the moan of his words and the warm breeze of his breath that causes Shiro to shiver above them. “He likes it when you tease him.”

His tongue continues to drag upward, stopping only to kiss and suck at certain parts that have Shiro melting around them and Lance wondering if he’s actually managed to memorize every spot that begs for the most attention. When he reaches just below the head, he plants his lips there, sucking lightly, his tongue peeking out to run over the vein buried beneath it.

Lance watches him, his face still pulsing in pain, his skin so hot and muscles so uselessly rubbery that it takes him a few moments to convince himself to move.

And when he does, he doesn’t really understand what he’s even trying to do. He’s lapping under the head as well, mere centimeters from Keith’s lips. He’s pressing forward and stealing Keith away, reaching out to grasp Keith by the arm of his uniform, crushing him into an eager, sloppy kiss.

Shiro lets out another groan. His hand follows Lance no matter where he goes, a blanket of comfort that he’s more than thankful for right now. Keith is all teeth again, all unyielding force and determination. He’s kissing Lance so hard that it almost hurts, Shiro’s cock pressed against their cheeks, his tongue lapping out in small intervals to pay it the respect that Lance knows that it deserves.

Keith is the first one to pull away, but he doesn’t break eye contact with Lance as he continues to lap and suck at Shiro’s cock. He’s reached his hand up again, his fingers loose and movements lazy and slow as he pumps at it. Lance swallows, his head swimming, his dick impossibly hard, but eventually, he leans in and continues copying Keith’s ministrations.

When he gets too close, Keith kisses him again. Shiro is wriggling around now, letting out the softest of breathy moans. He’s curled in on himself, his thigh twitching under Lance’s hand, his fingers tangling roughly in Lance’s hair.

“I— _ I’m _ —”

Lance isn’t sure if he should be proud of his reflexes or not. He doesn’t know if dodging the stream of cum that splatters out along Keith’s cheeks and in his hair is admirable, or selfish. But he appreciates Keith’s wide eyes and shocked expression nonetheless. Even as Shiro starts sputtering apologies, Lance can’t help but admire the sight of Keith sitting there in front of him, his cheeks growing darker red, contrasting beautifully with the thick strings of white cum that trail slowly over his skin.

“I-I tried to warn you!” Shiro’s slurring a bit, his eyes glassy, his hands trembling as he holds them up in front of himself defensively. Despite how apologetic he seems to be, Lance doesn’t miss the small upturn of a smile on his lips.

“You came faster than usual,” Keith bites out, clicking his tongue as he reaches up and smears the mess over his cheeks, “We weren’t even doing anything yet.”

“H-hey, you… you try sitting here watching two beautiful people… doing  _ that _ , and we’ll see how long you last.”

Keith rolls his eyes, doing more harm than good as he attempts to clean himself off with his hands alone. He doesn’t seem to have noticed the cum in his hair yet, and Lance isn’t exactly eager to tell him. He’s never watched porn long enough to witness the aftermath—to consider if he’s the sort of person who gets a thrill out of his own seed splattered over another person’s skin—but now that he’s taking in the way that it glistens on Keith’s cheeks, so lewd, so filthy, so  _ wrong _ in contrast to the stiff, well-managed uniform that he’s wearing, that Lance just _ knows _ he takes so much pride in…

He realizes that he might actually have a few more sexual kinks than he’d initially assumed.

“Well then.” Lance hears himself speaking more than he actually controls it. It’s as though all of the lust clouding his thoughts is causing his body to act on its own. “Why don’t we test it out? Me and Shiro gang up on you, you see how long you can last?”

Keith looks at him as though he’s grown a second head. He turns up his nose, palms falling to the ground to push himself up from his knees—that familiar, haughty, drowned cat glower settling more comfortably into his expression.

“That wasn’t part of the deal, cargo pilot,” he says flatly, narrowing his eyes. Lance doesn’t miss the color staining his cheeks. “You said you’d stop bitching if I helped you with Shiro. I helped you with Shiro, now I need to go wash my face.”

Lance barks a laugh, tipping backward and planting his butt firmly on the ground. Shiro is watching them silently, finally seeming as though he’s coming down from the high of his orgasm. He’s looking between them, his curiosity obviously piqued, if the eagerness in his expression is any indication.

“You’re going to walk all the way across the building to the locker room looking like  _ that _ ?”

Lance’s words cause Keith to twitch, his shoulders stiffening and his hands balling into fists at his sides.

“I’ll figure something out.”

Keith turns on his heel and stalks off towards the door again. Lance glances at Shiro, giving him the best puppy dog eyes he can muster, but Shiro only shrugs and sighs. Lance wonders just how many times he’s had to deal with Keith’s finicky, ornery attitude over the years, how many times he’s found himself in this exact situation, but with no one to even back him up or help to placate Keith.

Shiro drags a hand through his hair before tucking himself away and zipping up, looking about twice as haggard as he pats at his pants pocket and further frowns. “Keith, did you seriously take my...”

When Keith takes the opportunity to turn back to them just so he can flash a smug grin over his shoulder, Shiro’s access card held proudly between two fingers, Lance figures that enough is enough.

“Fine then, I don’t need you to get off again, Mullet,” Lance says, making quick work of unbuttoning his pants and zipping down his fly. “But,” he draws out, raising his voice to a singsongy pitch, “You’re going to miss one  _ fantastic _ show, if I do say so myself.”

Keith automatically scoffs low in his throat, but his hand stalls on the doorknob. Lance knows he’s got his full attention now, even if he isn’t so eager to show it. Shiro’s frown begins to crease back up into a handsomely wide smile, all perfect, pearly teeth that glint in the waning sun. Lance winces when his own grin tugs up his lips, still feeling all too sore there, and scoots himself back towards Shiro. He slips his pants and underwear down to his knees, and reclines into his warm, comforting chest.

Lance thinks about the expression ‘ _ curiosity killed the cat _ ’, thinks about the day he learned the little known second part of it — ‘ _ but satisfaction brought it back _ ’ — when he closes his hand around himself and strokes up, watching with barely contained glee as slowly,  _ slowly… _

Keith turns around. Biting his bottom lip, Lance allows only a small gasp to push through, letting his head fall back on Shiro’s shoulder when he presses his thumb against the aching tip of his cock. He’s already leaking precum, something that doesn’t happen to him very often when he’s doing this within the comfort of his own bedroom. He realizes that maybe this isn’t just for show or for getting back at Keith when it feels so good to be touched after watching Shiro, after listening to all those beautiful noises and feeling the hot press of Keith’s lips against his own.

Still, he can’t bring himself to break eye contact despite how it’s a bit embarrassing to be watched like this, not even as Keith swears under his breath and stomps right back over. If anything, his hand becomes slicker and his cock only throbs harder.

“You think you’re so damn cute, don’t you?” Keith tells him, words a barely contained growl of arousal, as Lance angles his hips higher and picks up speed in his strokes. It’s becoming almost like a fight, he thinks. A fight in seeing how quickly he can cum under Keith and Shiro’s all consuming gazes.

“I-I don’t think,” he huffs, something that flattens into more of a whine when he feels Shiro’s lips press against the side of his neck, “I  _ know _ I’m cute!”

Keith tilts his head, looking at a point past him for a few seconds, as if expecting Shiro to back him up. But Shiro’s laugh is loud at Lance’s ear, the only sound from him as his large hands come to rest on his thighs, and start spreading his legs wider.

Hand faltering over himself, Lance shudders, groaning when Keith angrily drops to his knees and tugs his pants the rest of the way down and completely off of him. It isn’t gentle, especially because he forces the narrow pant legs down without taking off his boots, which borders on almost painful as they snag against the laces. Keith is just reaching to bat away his hand, when Lance grabs his wrist, and shakes a finger at him.

“Ah-ah,” Lance says, trying to keep the confidence from wavering in his voice when Shiro’s teeth drag up to his ear, “You said you didn’t want to join in, so you only get to watch.”

“That’s stupid,” Keith spits back, pulling harshly away from him, but respecting his wishes not to touch him as he folds back onto his knees, “That’s not fair, I want to touch you.”

“Wow, I can’t imagine what that must feel like,” Lance snorts, and Shiro abruptly stops laughing. His lips pause at his earlobe, worrying it idly between his teeth instead. Lance can just imagine the way his eyes must be widening. “Wanting to touch your boyfriend and get him off, but he won’t let you…”

Keith gapes at him. Both of them appear to be completely and utterly speechless. The air is thick with tension, and the only noise seems to come from Shiro’s stilted breathing behind him and the sounds of cadets being yelled at in the yard below. Keith is looking at him with that same strange expression again, his cheeks backlit with red, and he glances away while he uselessly opens and closes his mouth a few times.

Lance feels like, in the back of his mind, he should probably be a little more ashamed at the way that this only spurs his erection on. When he pumps back down, he stops, letting his hand curl around the base to keep himself from cumming. The answer to his earlier question, is that obviously he can’t last even a fraction as long as Shiro.

Lance scooches a little closer to Keith, until his parted legs are cased on either side of him. There’s something tugging around his heart when he sees the downturn of those pouting lips, the unsure way that Keith’s eyes land curiously back on him, devoid of any cocky spark.

“Hey,” Lance says lowly, forcing the words from his dry throat and raising a tentative finger to clasp some of Keith’s hair between his fingers, “Sorry, if you want to touch me you can. I just...it’s just  _ frustrating _ , because I want to make you feel good, too.”

There’s no missing the way that Keith’s adam’s apple bobs, or the way that Shiro makes a strangled, whimpering sort of noise behind him. Shiro’s fingers are rubbing small circles into his thighs now, teasing up to his groin, but not touching it.

“No, you’re right,” Keith practically croaks, inching closer so that he’s hovering above him on his hands and knees, “You’re right, I…”

Keith doesn’t finish that thought, instead choosing to close the space between them. It isn’t much in the way of an explanation, but it’s progress enough that Lance thinks he can probably accept it. Either way, with those soft lips back on him, Lance feels like the luckiest man alive.

Keith is still aggressive in his approach, though there’s less use of teeth than usual, and more tongue sliding between his lips and exploring towards the roof of his mouth. Unable to contain his groan or the way his hand automatically continues pumping himself loosely, Lance bucks up when Keith’s knee pushes up against his balls.

“F-fuck,” Lance murmurs into his mouth, and Keith catches his bottom lip between his teeth. His breathing is ragged and heavy, spilling out wave after wave of heat against his face. Shiro is shuffling behind him, pulling away, and Lance whimpers at the loss of warmth against his back and on his thighs.

He can feel Shiro’s body shifting behind Keith more than he can see it—with Keith’s hair in his face and those hot lips still pressed up against his own. He isn’t entirely sure what Shiro is up to, but he knows for certain that it can only improve things now that Keith’s allowed for them to go so far.

Keith is opening up so beautifully. He’s reaching out. He’s allowing someone other than Shiro to touch him without shirking away.

Lance lets out a low hum of pleasure, tipping his head back as Keith’s teeth travel from his lips to his jaw—lingering over the old marks on his neck and surely only making them worse. He’ll be branded like this for life, he’s sure. Keith will never allow him to walk around unmarked.

With a start, Keith jerks away suddenly, wrenching his head to the side and spitting a breathless curse over his shoulder at Shiro—who, Lance realizes with a mischievous smirk, has grabbed him under the arms and pulled him back onto his lap. Shiro’s thick arms press Keith firmly into his chest, binding him down and keeping him from wriggling away.

“Sh-Shiro, what the fuck?!”

“You said that we could touch you, right? I just want to make sure that you make good on that promise.”

Keith’s aggravated huff is cut off by the long, pleasurable groan that crawls up his throat as Shiro leans forward to dig his teeth into the small stretch of exposed skin above the collar of his shirt. Lance swallows, his cock aching for his hand again, his heart beating so hard in his chest that he can feel it pounding in the tips of his fingers.

_ ‘Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump—’ _

He wants nothing more than to touch Keith right now.

_ ‘Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump—’ _

He wants to make him squirm.

_ ‘Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump—’ _

He reaches forward, one hand flat on the gritty concrete, one hand extended out to undo Keith’s fly. Their lips close the distance between them, Keith’s teeth still hard and his breath still hot—his muscles shuddering desperately in Shiro’s hold as he watches Lance with wide, needy eyes.

Shiro doesn’t sit still as Lance does. He isn’t so caught up in the moment—in watching Keith trapped like the rat he is for the first time in his life—that he’s rooted like a statue to the ground. Instead, his hands are groping around Keith’s body, popping the buttons of his shirt, sneaking up underneath the hem of his undershirt and dragging it up to expose that soft, milky belly.

Lance pulls away from Keith’s lips, his eyes dipping downward to take in the way that hot desert sun beats down on Keith’s skin—the way that the light hits the sheen of sweat that’s settled over him, sparkling against the paleness of it, glowing in the dying oranges and pinks of twilight. Lance feels, for a single moment, as though he’s living in a dream.

Just like last time, Keith’s lips are set in a firm line. He cocks his head to the side, color dark on his cheeks, refusing to look anywhere but at their shadows melding together on the ground.

Lance’s smile spreads impossibly wide. He wets his lips with his tongue, flicking up his gaze to meet Shiro’s eyes. Shiro’s face is just as gentle as always, but Lance doesn’t miss the satisfaction in the corners of his grin—the tiny peek of his canines through his lips, the small crease of his brows, the blurry, slow-returning arousal in the dark pools of his irises. After a moment, he nods, leaning back slightly as though to present Keith to Lance, to allow him to do anything that his heart desires.

And right now, Lance thinks, he wants to see if Keith might feel more comfortable in his mouth than Shiro did. He wants to find out if Keith is more of his size.

Keith lets out a curse through the tight cage of his gritted teeth when Lance reaches over and tugs open the front of his pants. He realizes belatedly, after already watching him undress in the locker room earlier, that he’s actually wearing underwear today. This thought raises a lot of questions that he has a lot of trouble not focusing on too much while he should be making Keith squirm—like why Keith didn’t wear any yesterday. Why he’d found it so necessary to go commando when he’d been planning to get laid. Why he’s suddenly staring so hard at the concrete that Lance thinks the anger in his eyes alone might set it ablaze—and he cuts himself off before he can get too distracted.

Keith agreed to this, he tells himself. If he wants to tap out, he’s more than capable of speaking up.

But still, with his fingers hinting at the firm bulge of Keith’s erection tenting the front of his boxers, Lance draws out in a rough croak of a voice, “Is this… is this okay?”

Keith tips his head back, his eyebrows low as even more color pools his cheeks. He looks as though he might want to break something. Probably, Lance thinks, both of their necks.

“Just touch me already, since you’re so worried about it.” he huffs, and Lance can tell that this is probably the most that he’s going to get. Immediately, Keith closes up again. Shiro’s whispering comforting words into the back of his neck.

Eventually, after a few moments of nervous tittering and sizing up the girth of Keith’s clothed cock in his hand, Lance crouches down, tugging Keith free through the hole of his boxers. He can feel Keith twitch, can hear the hitch of his breath as he wriggles in Shiro’s grasp. Even from between his legs, Lance can imagine the phenomenal scarlet of his cheeks.

And finally, with the image of Keith’s mortified face swirling around in his thoughts, he pokes out his tongue, dragging it around the width of Keith’s head which is, thankfully, a lot more manageable than Shiro’s.

Keith is dragging in a series of short, clipped breaths, squirming desperately in Shiro’s arms as Lance takes more of him into his mouth. He’s pleased as he reaches the base without choking this time. He’s a seasoned veteran at this point, he tells himself. He’s basically a pro by now. Keith doesn’t stand a chance here, and already, he seems as though he might be getting close to the edge.

Lance braces himself on the ground with one forearm, reaching between his knees and stroking himself as he bobs his head. It’s an awkward stance, but since he’s become more experienced, he feels that he pulls it off just fine—and with Keith gasping out a long string of breathless curses and Shiro nibbling idly at his neck, Lance knows that no one is paying attention to what he’s doing anyway.

He can tell that Keith is doing everything in his power to make as little noise as possible now, from the sound of his breath coming out in short, clipped puffs through his nose. He must be biting his lip, or pressing his mouth together hard in that same way that Lance is starting to get used to. At the very least, he’s relaxing now, melting under Lance’s mouth and settling more comfortably into Shiro’s arms. He’s bucking up a little, cursing quietly, arching his back with his legs spread out wide on either side of Lance—like a cage holding him in.

After a few minutes, it becomes clearer and clearer that Keith isn’t going to give in without a fight. Lance’s jaw begins to ache again, his back sore from crouching in such a strange position, his knees burning as they scrape against the ground. He sighs deeply, shoving down his annoyance and pulling back his head, turning up his face to get a good look at the shit-eating expression that Keith is surely sending his way.

But Keith isn’t even looking at him. He’s still hyper-focused on the ground. Shiro has pulled his undershirt up under his armpits, and he’s pinching and tugging at Keith’s nipples in a way that has them standing at attention. Lance repositions himself stiffly, ignoring the crack of his tired joints as he wraps a hand around Keith’s cock, never taking his eyes away from those perky pink nipples, over-stimulated and brushed with color between Shiro’s fingers.

“He’s… he’s sensitive there, isn’t he?” Lance asks. Shiro breathes a laugh, and Keith twitches, drawing his brows further down as his teeth dig into his bottom lip.

“He’s sensitive everywhere if you get him worked up enough,” Shiro replies softly, as though he’s talking about something romantic—like their first kiss or Keith’s favorite kind of flower. As though even these perverted moments are precious to him. “He won’t admit it, but I’ve always felt like kissing him really gets him going.”

Lance doesn’t miss Shiro’s playful wink, and he definitely doesn’t let that tidbit of advice go over his head. He cups Keith’s chin in his hand, drawing his face forward with less effort than he expected, with the way that Keith seems so determined to avoid his eyes. In comparison to how he acted the other day, this almost seems like a completely different Keith. He’s quiet and yielding now, as opposed to overpowering and nearly too rough.

And Lance wonders if this is why Keith ran away in the locker room, if he was afraid of losing control—of showing Lance this version of himself: powerless and laid bare, vulnerable when Keith works so hard to convince the world that he’s made of stone.

Shaking away the twinge in his heart, Lance presses their lips together, dragging his tongue over Keith’s mouth until he finally opens up, pressing closer and closer until he’s rutting his cock against Keith’s—just as they did in the hanger the other morning.

Keith is shuddering beneath him, pliant in his hands as Lance winds his fingers around both of their erections and begins to pump again. Between their lips, Keith lets out the tiniest hint of a moan. He’s shaking in his effort to stay quiet, his skin hot, his head tipping back against Shiro until Lance is suckling at his throat—so splayed out that Lance can already feel his orgasm creeping up at lightning speed.

But Keith cums first—with a throaty cry, so needy and so unguarded that Lance finds himself finishing mere seconds later. He falls back as he cums, only vaguely aware of the way that his semen splatters over Keith’s exposed belly, stringing up over his shirt and speckling on his chin.

Silently, Lance is a little bit proud of his range, especially after cumming once already today, but he knows better than to say anything.

Especially as Keith’s chest rises and falls, as he goes slack in Shiro’s hold—as Lance leans back, sitting on his heels, taking in the dried cum already tangling in his hair, the mess on his face, and the new trail of glistening white up his belly.

Keith heaves, a garbled collection of curses on his lips. Lance can hear the students down below filing into the building for the night. He wonders if Keith’s finishing cry was loud enough that anyone could have heard him.

The sun drops down beyond the horizon, as darkness bleeds slowly into the sky. Shiro is helping clean up the mess the best that he can. He’s pressing gentle kisses against the marks that he and Lance have left on Keith’s skin.

And Lance is overcome with a startling, unfamiliar emotion. He’s watching the two of them together, his heart aching in his throat, his eyes heavy with the hot wet of tears, his chest tight and his blood jittering through his veins.

He wants to kiss Keith now, he wants to hold him close and never let him go. He wants to wrap himself around the both of them and keep them safe. He wants to live in this moment forever.

Keith leaves eventually without a word. Shiro, with a nervous chuckle, tells Lance that he’ll be okay—that he just needs time to _ “lick his wounds”, _ so to speak.

Lance doesn’t understand what’s so hard about accepting pleasure, but he leaves it alone. He kisses Shiro goodnight, feeling like he’s floating as he makes his way down the stairs and into the hall.

It’s nearly time for curfew once he makes it to his room. It feels like life has sped up now, as though nothing exists but the moments that they’re together, as though there aren’t enough hours in the day to spend all of the time thinking about Keith and Shiro that he wants to.

As he opens his door, he tells himself, they’ll have more time tomorrow. They’ll have time to figure out what’s going through Keith’s head. They’ll have time to grow closer and more comfortable. They’ll have time to mess around, to go on dates, to be happy.

They only have time.

They have all of the time in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I didn’t win the 5k. I don’t really think that anyone was expecting that of me anyway, but I feel like honesty is very important and I hope that we can all walk away from this chapter feeling as though we trust me just a little bit more.
> 
> I had a really nice birthday! I’m not even sure if I mentioned that my birthday was last week, but, you know… it was! And it was nice! So I’m coming back for this chapter just a little bit older than before!
> 
> Anyway, until next week, thank you for reading!


	12. Can't Help Falling in Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Only fools rush in.

Lance slips into his room right before the final curfew alarm buzzes through the hall. The room is dark—the lingering scent of tonight’s dinner almost faded completely from the air. Hunk uses a lot of air freshener, he reminds himself, which might explain the overbearing smell of flowers, so strong that it stings the back of his throat. Despite how adamant he is that stealing food from the cafeteria and spicing it up in their room comes from a place of honestly ( _“and frankly, humanity—they shouldn’t legally be allowed to feed us some of this garbage!”_ ), he’s still terrified of getting caught with so much contraband cooking equipment stowed away underneath his bed.

He laughs, short and stifled, all breath whistling quietly through his teeth. He closes the door gently behind him, groping the wall in the dark. He takes a single step forward, as noiseless as he can muster, before Hunk’s bedside lamp clicks on and he feels as though his heart might have just leaped right out of his throat onto the floor.

Really, he tells himself, grasping the front of his uniform and stifling his screech of terror, if anyone else tries to scare him today, his heart might not be able to handle it.

“You missed dinner,” Hunk tells him simply, his voice flat, his expression devoid of any decipherable emotion. It reminds Lance entirely too much of someone else—someone far more insufferable and not nearly nice enough to always make extra portions even when he doesn’t show up. “I made a souffle, dude, and you weren’t even here to enjoy it.”

Lance notices the tension before he really understands exactly what Hunk’s so worked up about. He realizes immediately that he’s done something that he shouldn’t have, even though he isn’t entirely certain what that thing might be just yet.

“I was… _studying_ ,” He tries, but Hunk’s gaze is unwavering.

After a moment, Hunk lets out a deep sigh, throwing his hands up and shuffling back down into his bed.

“God, I can’t stay mad at you, dude! It’s too hard! I just wanted you to try the souffle before it got flat—you kinda hurt my feelings, man! But I know, I know, you have other friends and you gotta spend time with them, I totally understa—”

“No.” Lance cuts him off, the last feelings of his euphoria ebbing away, replaced slowly with a heavy, aching sort of guilt swelling in the pits of his chest. He finally realizes exactly what he’s done wrong, and more than anything, he feels as though he should at least try to make things right. “I should have told you that I was going to be out late—I-I didn’t really know until things were happening, but… I know I said that I’d always be here for dinner, at least. I’m sorry, Hunk. I should have come back sooner, but I... I bet the souffle was awesome.”

With his eyes closed and his arms still extended in the air, a small smile stretches over Hunk’s lips. He sneaks a peek in Lance’s direction before rolling over, pillowing his hands under his head and peering up at Lance in the same way that his nieces and nephews used to during sleepovers.

“It _was_ pretty awesome, man—melting in your mouth awesome! I’m going to make some more tomorrow, and I’m telling you, you’ll regret it if you miss out again—but what do you mean by _“you didn’t know until things were happening”_? Did you get into some kind of trouble, Lance? Are you running from someone? Oh my god, did they follow you in here because I have way too much stuff in here that’s not supposed to be in here, dude, I could get in a ton of trouble if anyone finds out—”

“Hunk, _Hunk_ , it’s fine! I swear, it’s nothing like that! Calm down!”

Lance raises his hands in front of him. Hunk has crawled back up into a sitting position in his terror, vibrating in the most cartoonish manner that Lance could ever imagine from a living, breathing person. His eyes are wide, the shadows cast about his cheeks from his lamp giving his expression the look of a scared kid sitting around a campfire with a flashlight tucked under his chin. It takes every ounce of Lance’s self-control not to laugh at him as he strides further into the room, plopping down on the corner of Hunk’s bed and resting a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s nothing, Hunk. I just… I had… kind of a run-in with Keith.”

Hunk’s eyebrows raise immediately, a pensive expression settling over his features. He leans back against his headboard, crossing his arms over his chest. Lance lets his hand fall from Hunk’s shoulder as he moves away, dropping his palm on top of the blankets between them and allowing his gaze to settle there.

He tries not to think too hard about what his fingers have been up to. He can’t get worked up about this all over again. He can’t keep letting Keith get the better of him like this.

“So did you guys fight over Shiro, or…?”

Hunk’s question sits between them in the air, a pregnant pause swelling like a balloon in the space of their silence. Lance bites his lip. Despite how much Hunk knows about this already, is it really okay to keep telling him these things? How many times can he listen to Lance gripe about his messed up love life before he finally gets sick of it?

With a deep sigh, he closes his eyes, pointedly ignoring the heat that spreads from his cheeks all the way to the tips of his ears and down his neck. He never did manage to cover up those hickies after getting out of the shower earlier. He wonders how many people he passed in the halls had wondered what was going on with him. He wonders how many people had known _exactly_ where he’d gotten those marks from.

He stops himself before he starts wondering if Keith went back to the locker room to wash the remaining cum out of his hair—or if maybe he’d strutted his stuff proudly, just _daring_ anyone to stop him and ask him about it.

“Well, I…” he isn’t exactly sure how to phrase it in order to make everything sound a lot less filthy than it actually was. He’s starting to get the feeling that Hunk might already think that he has a locker room fetish, even without knowing about everything that happened earlier in the day. “I sort of… messed around with Keith in the locker room earlier, then uh… I messed around with him and Shiro on the roof.”

“Jesus,” Hunk breathes, tapping his head against the headboard and turning his eyes to the ceiling, “You guys have a lot of stamina.”

Lance lets out a short, surprised laugh. His nerves begin to fade away, all of the tension wedged deep into his muscles smoothing out. He doesn’t know why Hunk’s kindness always surprises him. He doesn’t know why he keeps anticipating rejection from someone who has only been considerate and helpful every time that he’s reached out for assistance.

It chokes him up a little—the idea that Hunk might have his back no matter what happens. Through thick and thin, he tells himself that he always needs to stay in contact with someone like Hunk, who never judges him, never looks at him without anything but an open, loving heart.

In a way, it reminds him of Shiro, but that idea is so embarrassing that he shoves it down into the deepest recesses of his mind.

Clearing his throat, he chances a look up at Hunk’s small smile. He’s still watching the shadows streaking across the ceiling, still looking as though he’s thinking about something very hard. Lance wonders what he might say about all of this, if he knew the whole story. If somehow, he understood the complicated feelings that Lance has been having for Keith, and the way that those feelings somehow became the only thing that he can even think about anymore.

Keith and Shiro, forever tangled around every thought in his head, every wish in his heart, every dream that he’d always considered unreachable until he’d met two people with enough talent and determination to someday rule the world.

“So.” Hunk stops for a moment, rethinking the words that he’s about to say before he says them. “Do you like Keith now, or are you just putting up with him to get to Shiro, or… have you not figured that out yet?”

Of course Hunk can see right through him. He’s not sure why he’s always so surprised by that too.

“I—”

He doesn’t know how to say it. The words just won’t come out the right way, no matter how many times he rephrases them in his head.

He almost tells Hunk that Keith is only an obstacle standing in his way, that he’s slowly chipping at his relationship with Shiro until he can finally steal him away. But that doesn’t feel right anymore—and it never did, he knows. He doesn’t want to ruin Keith’s life anymore. He doesn’t want to hurt him. He doesn’t want to punish him for anything.

He finds, when he really thinks about it, that he wants to make Keith moan again. He wants to make him smile. He wants to hear him laugh again, to be the _reason_ why he’s laughing. He wants to know what he thinks is funny. He wants to know what it might feel like to be the person who makes him happy.

He wants to reach past all of those prickly parts, no matter how much it might hurt him, and he wants to run his fingers over all of the vulnerable pieces of Keith that Shiro has already seen before. He wants to know why he shirks away when someone is gentle with him. He wants to know why he’s so afraid of feeling too good and too precious, and too exposed to anyone but himself.

And he can’t stop himself then, from telling Hunk the words that flutter around in his heart. It’s the most honest thing that he thinks he’s ever said to anyone in his entire life.

No bluffing, no hiding his insecurities under layers and layers of bravado. No jokes or insults. No armor to shield him from what he truly feels inside.

Just, “I think… I might be falling for him.”

Just, “I don’t think he feels the same way about me.”

Just, “He doesn’t trust me at all, and… I don’t know how to reach him. I don’t know how to convince him that I’m not going to hurt him.”

Just Lance, sitting on Hunk’s bed, staring hard at his hand and thinking about Keith Kogane, wondering what in the world happened to his heart that he’d changed his mind so easily.

And knowing, deep down, that he’d never truly hated Keith. From the first moment that they’d met eyes in the classroom and Keith had smiled—that shy, uncomfortable smile—he’d been confused, he’d been angry, he’d been so embarrassed that he’d wanted to drop out of the Garrison and immediately return home where things were safe and no one was better than him at anything that he cared about.

But he’d never hated Keith.

He’d wanted to understand why he hid that smile, when it was so beautiful, so enchanting, just as warm and welcoming and loving as the softness of Shiro’s eyes.

He’d never known that he was capable of loving more than one person. He didn’t know that his heart was large enough to accommodate anyone but himself. He hadn’t known, when he’d first enlisted, that he would find exactly what he was looking for, just waiting for him inside of the walls.

People to love him, to look at him like he was the entire world.

He laughs again, but it’s harder this time—a humorless bark, a painful rush of air dragged from his lungs.

It hurts, he thinks, knowing that he’s nothing to Keith but another person to get off, another man to mess around with, another notch in his belt.

It hurts to think that Lance might slice up his fingers and burn himself in the flame of that overpowering gaze, but he might never find the Keith deep inside that Shiro’s so desperately in love with.

The Keith that gives love, just as he accepts it.

The Keith who won’t run away from him.

Hunk lets out a long breath. He raises a hand, leaning forward slightly and scratching the back of his head. The bed squeaks beneath their shared weight.

“Well,” he says after a long pause, finally looking back in Lance’s direction, that same small, reassuring smile never leaving his lips, “If you’re not sure if he likes you back, maybe you should consider, you know… wooing him a little?”

He almost laughs again—almost tells himself that, surely, Hunk must be joking. Wooing someone like Keith? What, with chocolate and flowers? Buying him a fancy ring? The thought of it is so absurd. For the life of him, he can’t imagine what Keith would say if he even tried it, or how long it might take for his wounds to heal after Keith inevitably kicked his ass.

But then he thinks about Shiro. He thinks about how romantic he is, how he’s always so tender, so loving and patient. He wonders if Shiro ever gave Keith gifts, if he ever says _“I love you”._ He wonders what sorts of things Shiro did to win Keith’s love so many years ago, and he wonders if it’s really possible to find something that might even melt the ice around Keith’s heart.

He straightens his posture, pulling his hand from the bed and bringing it to his chin. He doesn’t know anyone romantic. He doesn’t know anyone who might have any idea how to make a hard-ass like Keith melt.

But then he thinks about his mother and father, how they’ve been married for nearly three decades now. He thinks about how open-minded his mother is, how she’d always do anything in her power to help him.

He wonders if he’s really brave enough and stupid enough to ask her.

And yes, he really is.

He tells himself that a man will do anything for the love of someone who he wants so desperately. He tells himself that nothing is too hard for a man, when he’s vying for the heart of another.

He slips into bed later in the night, a wide grin stretched out over his lips—telling himself that first thing tomorrow, he’ll make his way to the payphones in lieu of eating breakfast. He’ll call his mom before she heads off to work.

She has to know something, he’s sure. She has to have some sort of idea of what a grumpy guy—like Keith and like his own father—might consider to be truly romantic.

And he settles into a comfortable sleep, dreaming of a life where Keith falls to his knees in surprise, so overwhelmed with emotions as Lance presents him a beautiful bouquet of flowers—and finally, maybe, the three of them can ride into the sunset and live happily ever after together.

 

* * *

 

_“...How your father and I got together?”_

The chatter around the payphones is deafening this time of the morning. There are students moseying around the few rows of lockers that extend this far down the hall, small groups of random people scattered about the benches with phones pressed against their ears, and the low hum of so much life just four rooms away in the cafeteria—the sugary sweet scent of maple syrup and the heavy grease of bacon making Lance’s stomach clench as he thinks about going through today without eating until dinner.

Anymore, he doesn’t make a lot of time for lunch. The cafeteria is always too packed. Hunk is on a different rotation. He never took the time to make friends with the cargo pilots in his classes. He doesn’t know anyone in there—not well enough to actually sit down and eat with them. There are too few seats seats at too few tables, too many unfamiliar and unfriendly faces, and the thought of asking some random stranger if he can sit with them like some kind of desperate, friendless idiot makes his skin crawl.

In his classes, lately, he feels as though karmic justice might have been served. It’s a small, bitter comfort—knowing that he was just bad enough to find himself at the top of the cargo pilot roster, just talented enough that his classmates call him cocky when they don’t think that he can hear them. They mistake his airheadedness and concentrated silence among them as condescending, when he has no way to explain to them that it’s hard enough to focus on his studies while his thoughts keep wandering off to his two secret boyfriends, without the stress of trying to make new friends thrown into the mix.

With a scowl, he tells himself that this is exactly what he deserves—to walk in Keith’s shoes after spending so much time mentally berating him. _Top Cargo Pilot_ isn’t even a title to be proud of. He feels like a phony when his instructor pats him on the back, tells him that he’s the head of the pack, and that he should be proud to find himself so high up in the ranks. No one around him seems to dream of bigger and better things. No one in his classes seems to hold out hope that someday, maybe they’ll claw their way out of this embarrassing position and find themselves among the real winners.

He wonders, briefly, if this is how Keith feels. If he secretly dreams a dream so large that it can’t even be contained within the halls of the Galaxy Garrison. If maybe, surpassing Shiro and taking the school by storm isn’t enough—and it will never be enough—until he’s closing in on the true red _‘X’_ marked on the map in his imagination.

He clears his throat, shaking his head and focusing on the sound of his mother’s voice on the phone. He keeps zoning out, still a little tired from coming in so late last night. His mother says his name slowly, asking if he’s okay.

“Y-yeah, mom, I’m good. I just—”

_“Have you met a girl or something?”_

He chooses to ignore how surprised she sounds, even through the crackle of the line and the relentless noise around him. Swallowing down his embarrassment, he nods, cradling the phone closer to his mouth and glancing around him.

“Well, uh, something… like that. I just—I wanna know how dad won you over. It was romantic, wasn’t it? Weren’t you always saying that he used to be romantic?”

Her laughter is musical. He can envision her sitting at the kitchen table now, tangled up in the cord of the old phone that she’s kept hanging in the kitchen since he was a baby—watching the sun rise with a mug of coffee in her hand, already dressed in her scrubs for work, even though she won’t have to leave for another hour. He thinks about the tired, dark creases under her eyes, the worn lines at the edges of her smile.

He imagines a time when she wasn’t his mother, but just another girl. He knows that she was beautiful. He’s grown up looking at the old photos of herself and his father, displayed proudly on the shelf in the living room. Those dusty photographs were an unyielding constant, even as his life had changed so rapidly in only eighteen years. From childhood into adulthood, even as he’d broken his first bone and lost his first tooth—even as he’d hurt and been hurt by other people, as the growing dread of living and dying in anonymity had festered in the dark trenches of his chest—he would peer up at the shelves as a child, reaching for the grainy gray of his mother’s smile in her wedding photo.

His mother back then seemed surreal to him, all his life. He couldn’t imagine a version of her that had never changed a diaper, never kissed a bandaid pressed over his knee. He didn’t know a version of his mother who didn’t work from early morning into the late afternoon—a version of her who went out and partied, who drank with her friends, who went for months and months rebuffing his father until he finally won her over with some mysterious, grandiose romantic gesture.

He thinks of his mother’s youth in the same way that he imagines the universe mending itself together at the beginning of time—a big flash of white light, a sudden shift between nothingness and everything all at once. He imagines the mere stitch in time that his mother existed without him, as though her life didn’t truly begin until the very moment that she first held him in her arms.

And it’s a selfish, childish thought, he knows. To imagine that she isn’t still living now that he’s so many miles away. The idea of her life rolling out like a red carpet before her, a finite path that she still walks even without him—it strikes a very peculiar kind of loneliness straight through his heart.

But she’s talking now, and he isn’t listening. For the second time this morning, he shakes his head in a vain attempt to clear his thoughts, scrubbing his free hand over his face.

“I’m sorry, mom. It’s loud in here. _What_?”

He hears a lull in her speech. He knows that she knows very well that he just wasn’t listening. Mentally, he kicks himself for never growing up to be a better liar.

 _“He bought me flowers, every day,”_ she says curtly, annoyance obvious in the short pause between her words, as though she’s just daring him to ask her to repeat herself again. _“He’d bring them to my work. Oh, the other girls thought it was so romantic, but it wasn’t at all. I told them all the time, ‘Well, you date him then! I don’t want him!’ They thought I was kidding, but back then, I would have paid money to have that man off my back.”_

She laughs then, another swell of music—another short sonata that washes that same soft, lonely comfort over his skin. He wishes that he could hug her again. He wishes that he could see the morning sun twinkling in her eyes as she stares out the window, thinking about days so long ago that, to Lance, they might as well have not even existed at all.

_“When the flowers didn’t work, he moved to chocolate. I told him, ‘I don’t like chocolate’, then I told him, ‘I’m allergic to chocolate’—but he didn’t believe me. He kept at it, he was so annoying! I almost threatened to call the police, but I think we both knew better than that. Your father knew that I wouldn’t let him in without a fight. And I knew that, if he really wanted to date someone like me, he’d better have something to offer.”_

Lance isn’t entirely sure how he feels about everything that she tells him. It’s the same outdated mindset that he remembers hearing so often from his grandparents—that uncomfortable acceptance of harassment when communication should have worked just fine. The idea that pushing hard enough could win someone’s heart even when they keep turning you down is anything but inappropriate.

For a moment, he wonders if he should really be talking to her about this after all. He wonders if pursuing Keith once he’s made it clear that he isn’t interested might be going down slightly _creepy_ territory.

It was a different time back then, he reminds himself, and his mother and father have been married for many years. He wonders if his mom never told him all of this because she knew how he’d react—and he wonders if the next time that he sees his dad, he’ll have a hard time not thinking of him as kind of a stalker.

 _“Eventually,”_ she tells him, _“I did agree to go out with him. He brought me out to dinner at the nicest place in town. But it wasn’t the food or the flowers, or even the chocolate that I always threw away anyway. When I talked to him during that date… I felt like he was really listening to me. I told him about my dream of becoming a doctor. I said that I’d just taken a break from school, but I was going to go back eventually. The next time I saw him, he gave me a gift, and do you know what it was?”_

He listens to the quiver of her voice, the swell of emotion cracking in her words. He imagines the tears twinkling at the corners of her eyes, the small flush under her skin, the way that she always wipes away her tears just before they fall—how she taught him to be strong, that there was strength in sadness and there was strength in love. That there was strength in allowing yourself to _feel_.

 _“It was a Littmann stethoscope.”_ she croaks another laugh. His heart aches for her. _“It must have cost him three-thousand pesos. He must have worked so hard just to give that gift to me. I’d been borrowing an old stethoscope from work all that time, but when I started my shift wearing that around my neck, every girl on the floor was jealous.”_

When he hangs up the phone minutes later, once he hears his sister talking in the background, bringing in his niece and nephew into the kitchen so his mother can drop them off at school on her way to work, he thinks about everything that she told him. He thinks about what sort of person Keith is—what he can learn about him, what he already knows.

He thinks about the stupid fingerless gloves that he keeps hidden under the sleeves of his shirt. He thinks about the way that he always smokes after they’re done messing around. He thinks about the rumors that Keith never eats or sleeps, that he rarely shows his face in his dorm room when it isn’t past curfew—that he seems to survive only in the library and in the simulation room, as though he has no existence outside of this school at all.

In his head, he pieces together every part of Keith that he’s collected so far. He tries to step back and get a better look at the bigger picture. He realizes, with a great, slow-rising frustration, that he doesn’t really know anything useful about Keith at all.

But he does know that Keith loves Shiro. He knows that they’ve been together for a very long time.

Just before the first morning bell rings, he collects his things and heads toward his first class—a large smile crawling over his lips. Keith is already in his own desk when Lance sits down. He raises a brow at Lance’s wide, mad grin. He doesn’t know what’s in store for him. He doesn’t know what sorts of things Lance is capable of.

Later today, when he should be filing into lunch, Lance is going to find Shiro. He’s going to ask him what sorts of things Keith actually likes.

And eventually, after collecting enough evidence, he’s going to woo Keith so hard that his heart will never beat the same ever again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, flyingisland reporting in again (later in the evening than usual)!
> 
> Why yes, I did listen to Elvis on an endless repeat while I was writing this chapter, thank you for asking.
> 
> In other news, I finally managed to get my computer “sort of” fixed (to the extent that I can turn it on and use docs again, at the very least), so my semi-hiatus is officially over! I’m not sure how obvious it was that I was even on any sort of hiatus, but I haven’t had a computer since March, so… I guess "hurrah" to that! 
> 
> Anyway, as always, thank you guys so much for your support! See you next week!


	13. May You Bury Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You mean…” Lance drags in a deep breath. His cheeks are cherry-red, his bottom lip jutting out as he pulls down his brows and finally meets Shiro’s eyes. “Like—like a date?”

It takes Shiro a moment or two to fully understand what Lance is trying to ask him.

He’s sitting in his usual spot in the library, skipping lunch in lieu of working on all of the extra paperwork that’s piled up after yesterday’s ordeal. Really, he has no idea how Lance even knew where to find him in the first place. Keith has been scarce since yesterday, which isn’t surprising in the least—all things considered. Lance has worked wonders with Keith in just the small amount of time that he’s been a part of their relationship, but some things will take more time.

Like teaching Keith those difficult lessons that Shiro gave up on a long time ago—about trust and letting go, about being vulnerable, and loving someone enough to allow them to see every part of you without the fear of repercussions. It’s been a long, treacherous road. Lance has no way of understanding how far Keith has actually come.

He has no way of realizing that Keith is different now, than he was when Shiro met him—different from the wild child who ate only with his hands, than the scruffy kid who wailed as though he was being tortured when Shiro’s mom only wanted to give him a bath, from a morose teenager walled up in the steel doors that he’d built around his heart, with no concept of feeling safe with another person and no understanding of how it felt to be loved.

With a small, sad smile, he shakes his head to rid it of these memories. He sets down his pen, shuffling his paperwork together and turning his full attention to Lance standing above him.

“Why don’t you sit down?” he asks. Lance hesitates.

“I’m… kind of in a hurry.”

“To  _ “woo” _ Keith?” he lets out a short laugh. “Your heart is in the right place, Lance, but you’re better off if you take your time with this one.”

In a way, it’s a bit of a dirty trick. He feels a little guilty as Lance shuffles uncomfortably from foot to foot before sliding into the seat across from him. In reality, he has no clue what sorts of romantic things Keith might like. It’s been so long since he’s tried anything, and even when he did, the results were so varied that he would never imagine betting his money on one single thing.

But he wants to spend some time with Lance. Ever since they started this relationship, he’s felt himself slowly drifting away from both of them. He feels himself lingering just outside of the loop, always a day behind of whatever’s going on between Lance and Keith. Never knowing positively exactly how either of them, actually feel.

Lance is still trying to make things normal. He doesn’t know about Kerberos yet.

And of course he doesn’t, Shiro tells himself. He still isn’t sure how Keith found out. He has his suspicions about Matt, but he’d never imagine actually asking. He isn’t interested in pointing fingers or making waves, and for the time being, he wants to think about leaving as little as possible. He wants to concentrate on the here and now, on the beautiful boy fidgeting nervously across from him, and the idea of Keith so flustered an entire day after finding himself trapped between both of them that he’s holed himself up in his room.

“You know what?” Lance looks up as Shiro speaks again, a hopeful upturn of his lips, an excitement twinkling in his eyes. “I don’t have any duties this weekend. Why don’t we take a trip into town and see if we can find anything?”

Lance flushes, averting his eyes to his hands his in lap and squirming in his seat. Shiro allows his invitation to linger in the air between them, forcing his expression not to show how suddenly nervous he’s feeling about this. Telling himself that Lance isn’t going to blow him off. He’s not just in this for Keith. They haven’t outgrown him just yet.

“You mean…” Lance drags in a deep breath. His cheeks are cherry-red, his bottom lip jutting out as he pulls down his brows and finally meets Shiro’s eyes. “Like—like a _ date _ ?”

There’s such an excitement swelling in his words that Shiro can’t help the wide grin that breaks out over his lips. His own cheeks are feeling a little hot now, as he shoves down the embarrassment and the lingering feelings of pushing the envelope—telling himself that Lance isn’t going to rebuff him like Keith does. And even Keith, he knows, would still go if he asked.

He just wouldn’t seem quite as star-struck as Lance does right now.

“Of course it’s a date. I did say that I’d take you on one, didn’t I?”

Lance’s eyes are the size of dinner plates. He watches Shiro for a moment, as though his thoughts haven’t quite caught up to the current moment, until finally, a big, toothy grin stretches over his cheeks and he places both of his palms on the table.

He’s standing again, his shoulders shaking, a little reminiscent of Keith coming down off of the high of flying the simulator as he grins down at Shiro with that handsome, albeit slightly disconcerting, maddened smile.

“Of course I’ll go with you!” He’s considerate enough to whisper this, but Shiro doesn’t miss the enthusiasm charging through his words. “I’ve never been on a date before!”

He’s speeding away before they can even make any real plans. Shiro lets out another laugh, resting his face in his hand and staring down at his paperwork without taking any of it in.

It’s all a little too good, he thinks. It’s a lot more than he ever would have thought that he deserved. Keith will meet him in the library in a few hours—he’d never miss a day, even now. They’ll study together. He’ll watch the way that the sun plays golden against Keith’s soft skin. He’ll slip his hand under the desk, lacing their fingers together in Keith’s lap.

He’ll enjoy the quiet comfort of Keith’s presence. He’ll take Lance out this weekend on a date. He’ll help Lance win the affections that he doesn’t realize that he’s had all along—he’ll watch the way that Keith becomes soft and pliable in Lance’s hands.

And he’ll wonder how he got so lucky to find himself tangled up between the two of them. He’ll enjoy every moment that they have together until he has to go away.

This thought sours his mood a little. With a frown, he turns his attention back to his papers.

Eventually, he’s going to have to tell Lance what’s going on. Sooner than later, this perfect illusion that they’ve build around themselves is going to have to crumble and fall.

 

* * *

 

When they were kids, Keith accidentally hurt Shiro’s feelings more times that he can count. Looking back, he feels embarrassed about how sensitive he was, even as Keith’s elder, even as the two of them grew entirely too old to still find themselves dancing around the idea of being infatuated with one another—as, unfortunately, they did.

It wasn’t until Shiro’s seventeenth birthday that he can really say with absolute certainty that they could have been considered “together”—in the traditional sense, at least. It wasn’t until that first night that they’d found themselves alone in Shiro’s apartment, when his mom had went out of state to visit potential colleges with Ryou, and Shiro hadn’t considered at the time that she might have been gifting him some alone time with his sort-of-kind-of boyfriend as a birthday present.

And it had been a disaster, he knows. It’s laughable now—the way that Keith had clammed up beneath him, how his entire universe had shattered in his trembling palms as he’d moved into Keith and both of them had known very well that he was entirely too big to actually pull it off without much discomfort.

He doesn’t like dwelling on it too much, even now. He doesn’t like thinking about the way that he’d leaned forward to hold Keith close and he’d shirked away. He doesn’t like to remember how weak he’d been—how he’d truly felt like the most useless husk of a person, if he couldn’t even make Keith’s first time special.

It had been better the second time around, when Keith had stepped up to take charge. He was still a frail, bird-boned little wisp of a boy, still all thin skin and purpling bruises. But he’d been gentle back then, more gentle than Shiro had expected. He’d slipped inside of Shiro slowly, carefully, and everything around them had seemed to slow down and shift. Shiro had felt whole then, as he had when Keith had kissed him at the pond, as he had when Keith had smiled at him two days later through the bars of the orphanage. He’d felt as though this was how he should have treated Keith—with a precision and a knowledge that he just didn’t have. With an immediate talent that he would never understand how Keith always seemed to have for everything that he tried.

His first few experiences with Keith were a long series of awkward trysts and adolescent fumbles.

They’d learned a lot from one another. They’d grown more comfortable. Keith stopped pulling away quite as often. Shiro stopped asking for too much. They’d learned to sync their wants and needs, to move together instead of knocking heads, to read each others body language so that neither of them had to say much at all anymore.

And it’s nice, feeling so comfortable around another person, especially so far away from home. It was a relief when Keith enlisted and joined him, when he finally felt as though he could shed the protective skin that he wore around his peers and be himself again.

It’s been a blessing having Keith around again, but as it is, Shiro finds that he hasn’t had first date jitters in such a ridiculously long amount of time that it’s beginning to feel as though he’s an awkward teenager all over again.

Lance is waiting for him just outside of the front doors, his weekend-pass to leave the Garrison clutched against his chest as though he thinks that, at any second, a commander might come around the corner and demand to know what he’s doing.

For a moment, Shiro stops to ponder if this might be a good example of abusing his power—if his pull with the higher-ups should be used for more respectable things than pulling a few strings to leave base for shopping and dinner with his new boyfriend—but they’d accepted his request without any questioning or suspicion. He reasons with himself that anyone can get a pass to leave if they fill out the correct paperwork. He isn’t taking advantage of a broken system. He isn’t doing anything that could actually get him into real trouble, as opposed to maybe just annoying a few of his peers who might have had their passes denied.

It’s perfectly reasonable that, as a higher ranking student, he should be allowed to forego the forms, if only because he fills out quite a bit of other paperwork when everyone else gets time off after class. He works hard for this school, he tells himself. He misses out on a lot of fun experiences in order to give speeches at orientation and tutor struggling students in the evening. He spends plenty of weekends holed up in the library, flipping through the endless files of endless students—signing off on detention slips, accepting requests to visit home, toiling away with the mundane day-to-day as a glorified secretary while everyone else gets to enjoy their time off.

Keith had argued with him, anyway, when he’d told him that he wanted to leave with Lance for the weekend—once he’d actually cooled off enough that he was willing to have a normal conversation. He’d told Keith that he wasn’t sure about abusing his power, that maybe he should submit the correct forms and wait the two to three weeks like anyone else, but Keith had thrown him that familiar, fiery, heart-throbbing glare. And he’d told him, very simply,  _ “They take advantage of you all the time, Shiro. Who gives a shit if you want to go out for a weekend? If anyone complains, I’ll kick their ass myself.” _

It still doesn’t make him feel less selfish, but he tries to convince himself that no one could blame him for having some fun of his own. If Keith, of all people, doesn’t mind him spending time alone with Lance, then maybe all of this is actually okay after all.

With a short shake of his head, he forces himself to stop arguing mentally over the morality of the situation long enough to close the distance between himself and Lance. It’s early in the afternoon now. Lunch ended long enough ago that no one is still lingering in the halls, and dinner won’t be served for another two hours. There are only a few other students ambling along, aimless and bored on a Saturday with nothing to do but work on homework in the library or call home to visit their families.

The rec room is always too crowded and too noisy. The television is permanently stuck on a boring channel that focuses only on the history of the space program, pitched so low and quiet that it’s impossible to hear anything above the buzz of their peers talking and the clattering of the pool table and the assortment of games stocked up in the corner.

He’s only ventured in there twice since he enlisted—once as a jittery new recruit, desperate to make friends, and once more in a vain attempt to help Keith meld more comfortably with their fellow cadets. Both, he thinks with a small, sardonic smile, ended in disaster.

“So what kind of restaurants do they have in town?” Lance asks, his grin just as wide and excited as it was a few days prior in the library, “I bet it’s American food, right? Like corn dogs or burgers—coleslaw, or something like that?”

Shiro raises a brow, but he doesn’t say anything about it. For a moment, he ponders the idea that the sort of food that Lance has grown accustomed to until moving to the Garrison might have been just as different from their peers’ as his was.

He hasn’t been bullied about his school lunches in years, sure. No one tells him that the noodles that he brings to lunch in worn tupperware are too smelly or too weird. No one tell him to  _ “eat real food” _ as he lifts the lid of his bento box and starts picking at his sushi, but his roommate still sends him a curious look when he opens the box of anpan that his mom sends him every holiday. And no matter how often he offers, the guy never seems quite willing to actually try some.

He wonders, momentarily, if Lance feels the same. If he’s already experienced how it feels to be so different than the mass of people living in the confined space of the Galaxy Garrison—if he finds himself wondering how they can antagonize him for wanting the food that he grew up loving, while happily eating the crap in the cafeteria—how anyone could turn down udon but take seconds on sloppy joes, how anyone could treat him like an alien for enjoying his own mother’s cooking, when they just happened to grow up eating something else.

It’s a silly thing to get caught up on, and usually he doesn’t give it a second thought. It’s so normal by now—the homesickness when he thinks about the nearest Japanese restaurant sitting almost three-hundred miles away, the feeling of discomfort when the closest reminder of home is the salty, overly-processed Ramen noodle packets in commissary—but he wonders how raw it still is for Lance. He wonders if the biggest reminder of how many miles sit between himself and everyone who he loves might be the foreign food that he’s finds on his tray every morning and every evening, while no one else seems to mind it at all.

It seems unfair for him to feel a sense of camaraderie with Lance now, that he never did with Keith. Because it’s not Keith’s fault that he never got to know his family. It’s not his fault that his set of struggles were far different than Shiro’s own. Keith spent a lot of time growing up eating Shiro’s mother’s cooking too, sure, but back then, Shiro knows that he would have eaten just about anything. A starving child, Keith never had the chance to find a meal that resonated with him, that reminded him of home.

He’d never tethered himself to comforting memories. He never had anything to hold onto that might tie him to his past, or his parents, or anything that he was before he was taken to the orphanage.

Keith would be infuriated if he knew that Shiro was getting depressed again on his behalf, so he forces himself to stop thinking about it. Keith likes sushi now, he loves steak and potatoes, french fries dipped in ice cream, and root beer floats. He still sometimes eats curry with his hands. He still slurps the remaining broth of his soup like the wild child that Shiro first brought home to his family. He’s slowly begun creating an identity for himself through the things that he loves and hates, through simpler means that don’t take too much time to explain in order for someone else to understand him. There’s no point in rehashing all of those memories when Keith seems all-too comfortable to leave them in the past.

Lance is looking at him warily now, still crinkling his weekend-pass in his hands despite the fact that they’re already halfway down the front path by now—closing the distance between them and the Garrison’s personal-use military vehicle waiting to take them into town, parked just a few yards away.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro laughs softly, his cheeks warm as he reaches up to scratch the back of his head, “I didn’t realize that you weren’t from around here. It’s weird, isn’t it—the food, I mean. It takes a lot of getting used to.”

Within seconds, Lance’s eyes light up. He speeds up a little, jogging to wind around Shiro as they close in on the vehicle.

“I can’t even eat it,” he says, breathless and dewy under the oppressive heat of the sun, “I thought just me and Hunk hated it. It’s too bland! None of it has any flavor! Just between you and me… I haven’t eaten in the cafeteria in  _ months _ now. Hunk has his own culinary set-up hidden under his bed.”

He’s pressing a single finger to his lips as a show that Shiro should keep all of this intel  _ hush-hush _ . With good reason too, Shiro thinks, because contraband on that level could probably get both of them in some very hot water.

Part of him feels a swell of pride at the thought that Lance trusts him enough to tell him these things. He feels cool, almost, like the kind of guy who can keep a secret. Like the sort of higher-ranking officer who can be trusted not to spoil a good thing just because he can’t resist reporting it back to their commanders.

He opens the door for Lance, stepping to the side and motioning for him to squeeze into the back seat. Lance’s grin is stretched from ear to ear, and he lets out a long, pleasurable sigh as the air conditioning inside settles over his sweaty skin.

Shiro scoots in after, shutting the door gently and turning to return Lance’s smile. This will be fun, he tells himself. He’ll bond with Lance. He’ll help him find a gift for Keith. He can figure out what sorts of foods remind Lance of where he grew up, and he can understand what brought him to the Garrison, what pushed him to leave home, what drives him to work so hard and keep going despite the obstacles still standing in his way.

The driver makes small talk as they pull away from the compound, dust billowing out behind them as they’re jostled over uneven terrain. Lance is a little star-struck, he can tell. It’s not every day that they’re approved to ride around in these vehicles. This might be his first time. Shiro watches fondly as Lance’s face lights up while the driver explains to him what sorts of things a  _ JLTV _ might be used for in actual combat. It’s cute, the way that he’s so eager to ask questions that he’s stumbling over his words, asking excitedly if he would ever be allowed to drive one of these as a cargo pilot.

“I enlisted as a cargo pilot,” the driver tells him, “They always act like the fighter pilots get the best gigs, but we get to drive all of the cool vehicles.”

Shiro leans back in his seat. He enjoys the sound of Lance’s animated voice, the feeling of the air conditioning cooling the sweat on his skin. If the driver notices the way that he slides his palm over the seat between them and laces his fingers with Lance’s, he doesn’t mention it, and neither does Lance.

But Shiro doesn’t miss the way that Lance’s hand tightens around his. He watches the dust floating around them, the sun pinned high up in the vast blue canvas of the sky. He thinks about boarding a ship and shooting off beyond the clouds someday, very soon—shrinking into the horizon until he’s nothing more than a tiny pin-prick, until he’s so far up that the warmth of Lance’s skin will only be a distant memory.

Today is too good of a day to get wrapped up in his sadness. He’s worked too hard to achieve this dream of his to give up just because he’s fallen in love.

Lance’s hand is warm and soft, smoother than Keith’s, gentle as his fingers stroke over Shiro’s thumb and up to his wrist. He’ll think about this moment, months from now, when he spends the first lonely night in space.

He’ll think about Keith holding him close on the roof in a pool of a golden sunset later on—telling him to enjoy what time he has left, to live vividly, to find some semblance of normalcy in the chaos of their lives before his day-to-day is nothing more than inspecting ice chunks billions of miles away from home—when everything inevitably falls apart.

He’ll wonder where he went wrong in life, to lead him to that distant black stain of disorienting pain and otherworldly monsters so much further out in the universe than he could have ever hoped to travel. He won’t understand why he couldn’t have just left his feet planted firmly on Earth instead of getting tangled up in a living Hell with no hope of ever seeing Keith’s smile or hearing Lance’s laugh ever again. He won’t remember why he’d ever been willing to leave both of them behind.

He won’t remember, as he’s sleeping in rags on the cold concrete of an animal’s cage, the racket of his pulse and the thrumming of pain burning through his veins the only familiar comforts that he has left, why he’d wanted so desperately to leave home at all.

These final stretches of time before his departure will be the only sun that he’ll see for over a year once he’s gone. They’ll be the only warmth that wraps around him late at night, the solitary hope that will push him to keep moving forward no matter how impossible it becomes just to survive.

He has no way of knowing now what lies in his future. He still doesn’t understand the dread that swells larger and larger in his heart as time slowly slips through his fingers.

But today, two months until he departs to Kerberos with Matt and Commander Holt, he doesn’t think about anything but Lance’s voice and Lance’s smile, of Keith waiting for them back at the Garrison, unknowing of the surprise that they have in store for him.

He thinks about spending time with his new boyfriend, getting to know him just as well as he knows Keith—finding so many things about him to miss when he eventually goes away.

And he thinks that today will be a good day, that it will lead into a good night.

That everything will be okay in the end, because finally, after so many years of floundering without a place in the world where he truly feels comfortable in his own skin, he feels like he’s found a home in the hearts of two people who are absolutely, overwhelmingly perfect for him

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this week’s chapter title is the definition of a really neat word that I learned some time ago (when was this chapter written again? It’s a mystery). It’s an arabic word تقبرني (To’oborni), which translates to, of course, “May you bury me”. Basically, “I love you so much that I hope I die first”. 
> 
> Which is befitting, I think, because there are some very ominous undertones to this chapter, wouldn’t you think?
> 
> Hm, it’s probably nothing.
> 
> Anyway, as always, thank you so much for reading! See you next week!


	14. Nobody Puts Bojangles in the Corner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A date goes awry, but not in the way that Shiro would have expected.

For Lance, it seems, today is a very long series of many, many miracles.

He’d thanked the driver, starry-eyed and elated, as Shiro had pulled him away into town. He hadn’t even seemed to be paying attention when Shiro made small-talk about the time that they needed to return to the Garrison tomorrow morning, and he’d barely spoken a word as Shiro had lead him down the dusty path toward the only restaurant in town.

It’s not quite the same as the place where he grew up with Keith, but it still reminds Shiro of home. They pass by all of the tiny gift shops, the drug store with the flashing red sign, and though there’s no looming, dark presence of an orphanage hanging over the town like a black rain cloud, his chest still tightens at the thought of it.

For a moment, as he’s slipping his fingers into Lance’s hand and pulling him onto the sidewalk, he wonders how it might feel to bring him home. How it might be, with Keith lodged comfortably between them, to introduce Lance to his mother and his brother. To feel, after all of this planning and all of the stress involved with courting him, as though he’d finally managed to make Lance a permanent fixture within this relationship.

When they’d finally pushed through the doors to the restaurant, Lance was so blown away by the concept of a genuine western-style saloon that he didn’t even wait for the hostess to show up before he barreled inside.

Shiro had waved to the girl apologetically, grabbing Lance by the back of the shirt and hauling him away from the assortment of horseshoes that he’d been admiring on the wall. They’d been seated near the back, away from the noise of the few other patrons. Shiro had been thankful for the privacy, away from prying eyes as he’d stretched his legs under the table and rested his feet against Lance’s. And Lance had smiled ever-wider, toothy and so expressive—everything that Shiro had never gotten the chance to experience from another person on a date.

It feels strange now, nearly half an hour later, as the waitress sets down their respective meals and Lance’s eyes somehow manage to grow even larger. It feels as though he’s living an entirely different life than he’d anticipated. He misses Keith now, yearns for the feeling of him warm and quiet, lingering just at the edge of the conversation as a silent comfort.

A security blanket, Shiro thinks with a wry smile. He’s too dependant on Keith anymore. He can barely get through one date alone without wishing that Keith were here to make him feel a lot less nervous. His confidence dwindles. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do or say. He’s truly useless without Keith’s soft prompting, without those watchful eyes always burning through him.

He truly can’t do anything alone, and he wonders, defeated, if he’s really as good and as strong of a man as everyone seems to think that he is.

Lance is already digging into his meal. It’s some kind of fried chicken dish smothered in gravy, something that Keith would like, Shiro is sure—and he curses himself inwardly for comparing the two of them so much.

It’s true that they’re very similar, but Lance hides his insecurities behind a mask of confidence and distracting theatrics, while Keith locks his safely away behind the thick, spiny layers of anger and indifference. Lance reaches out for comfort when he’s feeling lonely, while Keith can’t stop running away. Lance embraces the emotions that make him human, no matter how much they might hurt him, while Keith still struggles to take the baby steps towards truly feeling anything.

Keith is wildly talented at everything that he tries, Lance loses his footing the moment that things begin to go awry. But they’re both beautiful and they’ve both possessed his thoughts completely.

And they’re both so much better at navigating the ups and downs of life than he thinks he might ever be.

“Okay, I can get behind this,” Lance says through a mouthful, “ _ This _ is good food.”

Shiro laughs softly, dragging his fork through the macaroni on his own plate as he watches Lance devour his food at lightening speed. They sit in silence for a few minutes after that. Shiro listens to the mingling of conversations around them, to the sound of cutlery tapping against plates, to waitresses greeting regular customers and the television playing some old western flick above the bar.

He thinks about Keith sitting in the library alone back at the Garrison. He wonders, with a small twinge in his chest, if he’s lonely.

“So, down to business.” he flicks his gaze back toward Lance at the sound of his voice, biting his lip to stop himself from laughing at the serious way that Lance pats his face with his napkin before lacing his fingers together on the table. “I have no idea what Keith likes.”

He doesn’t respond immediately, because he really has no clue what to say. The gifts that he’d given Keith during childhood were always things that normal kids could expect from their families without question—hand-me-down clothing and books, a warm breakfast, dinner that wasn’t shipped in bulk pre-frozen, and nights spent sleeping in a warm bed, without fear of getting woken up by any of the bigger kids.

Those sorts of presents are out of date now. If Lance even tried buying Keith some sort of clothing, he isn’t sure what kind of reaction he might get. Food might work, but there aren’t a lot of opportunities for Lance to try that. They aren’t allowed to bring anything perishable into the compound without preemptive approval, and the disappointing snacks at commissary—while definitely edible enough that Keith wouldn’t turn his nose up at them—maybe aren’t as romantic as Lance is hoping for.

“He wouldn’t like flowers, would he?” Lance asks, his mood immediately dampening, as he mutters under his breath about how stupid of an idea that apparently is. “He doesn’t seem like he’d like chocolate either… _ Does _ he like chocolate? Of course he doesn’t like chocolate!”

Shiro’s having a lot of trouble not telling him how cute he sounds right now, but somehow, he resists the urge. He fills his mouth with a few forkfuls of macaroni, not quite trusting himself not to put any ridiculous ideas in Lance’s head just for the sake of seeing how Keith will react.

“You know, I knew a girl in high school whose boyfriend won her one of those big stuffed bears from a carnival once… are there carnivals around here? Do you think  _ winning  _ it matters, or do you think it’s more about the bear itself? Do you think Keith even likes bears? I feel like he probably hates anything that moves, but a stuffed bear doesn’t move so—”

“Lance, it’s okay, calm down,” Shiro holds his hands up in front of him after setting down his fork, forcing down his grin as Lance continues staring at him with that owlish, flabbergasted expression. “There are a few gift shops around here that Keith likes to go in when we visit. I’m sure you’ll find something that he’d want.”

Lance blinks once, then twice. His brows drop in concentration, and he brings a single finger to press over his lips.

And finally, once Shiro has nearly finished his food, Lance asks him, “Does Keith really come out here with you? Like on dates?”

Shiro laughs again, color rising to his cheeks. It’s embarrassing to admit it, that Keith wouldn’t consider any of their weekend outings more than simple “business endeavors”, he’s sure, while he, himself, thinks that they might be the most romantic that their relationship will ever get.

It’s not that he’s complaining, really, it’s just…

Most people might start getting ideas if he were to tell them that his boyfriend doesn’t like going on dates.

“There’s a drugstore in town that sells cartons of cigarettes,” he says simply, and it seems that it’s enough. Lance doesn’t press the issue any further, too caught up in his own thoughts to linger on the idea of Keith seriously going through the trouble of filling out all of the required paperwork just to sneak cigarettes into the Garrison.

The waitress stops by and collects their plates, leaving the small bill booklet on the table and telling them to pay when they’re ready. She looks between both of them for only a moment, something strange sitting in her eyes—as though she wants to ask something, but she knows better than to actually ask it.

Shiro gets it anyway. He knows that it’s uncommon for two men in Garrison uniforms to be playing footsie under the table, talking about dates and gifts and the romantic interests of another man who isn’t even with them. His ears burn, but he thanks her anyway.

And he wonders, briefly, if Lance would be angry if he told her that they were dating.

Lance doesn’t complain when he pays their bill like Keith always does. He doesn’t shuffle out stiffly or refuse to allow Shiro to grab his hand as they leave.

They make their way out into the orange blaze of the afternoon sun, squinting through the blurry sizzle of heat rising from the ground, sweaty and full, as Shiro laces his fingers with Lance’s once again and begins leading him toward Keith’s favorite shop at the end of the strip.

The sun and the heat and the sweat clinging uncomfortably to his skin all remind him of playing outside for far too long as a child, of squirting Keith with water guns that he’d filled up with the hose behind his apartment building. It reminds him of balmy summer nights under a blanket of stars, hiding out in tattered tents in the courtyard. Of reading magazines about fighter jets in the dark, under the glare of Keith’s flashlight in his eyes—of studying April through August for his entrance exams, his eyes so tired and his muscles so sore that Keith had poured ice cubes down the back of his shirt to keep him awake.

The memories flood the back of his thoughts, as he wonders if someday, he’ll cling to these moments in the same way. If somewhere in the distant future, there will be a Shiro sitting by himself, pondering the way that Lance’s sweat-slick palm had felt in his own, how his eyes had sparkled in the sun like blue diamonds and his lips had been so soft and so warm when he’d pulled him behind the safety of a street sign and kissed him.

He wonders how many of these scenarios will become another stitch in his comfort blanket. He wonders how many versions of Lance will carry him through hard times.

He has no way of knowing it now, but someday, he’ll be desperate to remember everything that he can to carry him through the hardest months of his life.

 

* * *

 

“You’re messing with me, right? You  _ have _ to be messing with me. Keith can’t possibly be this… this  _ lame _ , right? Shiro, please tell me Keith isn’t this lame.”

Shiro stifles a laugh with his fingers on his lips, grasping Lance’s shoulder lightly with his other hand and steering him away from the wide, backlit glass counter and toward the back of the store. The cashier watches them suspiciously, surely not too happy about Lance’s too-loud, too-brash, sardonic comments. It takes everything in Shiro not to bow in apology.

There are weapons littered about the walls—ranging from antique pistols to long, ornate and smoothly polished katanas. An assortment of expensive knives sits in the glass box of the counter, and Shiro can still remember the awe-struck expression on Keith’s face as he’d pressed his fingers to the glass and marveled at them, the first time that they’d ever come in here.

“Does he seriously not have a life outside of the Garrison?” Lance asks, raising a brow at the iron fans showcased on the wall. “He seriously fanboys over weapons? He doesn’t have a normal hobby…? Like watching movies or something? He can’t collect stamps or postcards like a normal person?”

Shiro snorts, letting go of Lance in favor of inspecting a glossy pair of nunchucks across from him on the shelf.

“Can you really imagine Keith collecting stamps, Lance?”

Lance lets out a long sigh, shrugging his shoulders noncommittally and moodily flipping through a few packets of mace hanging from a hook on one of the other shelves.

“He already has a knife though. How many more does he need?”

There’s a pack of cheap throwing stars that Lance is staring at now, as though he’s wondering if Keith might actually appreciate them. Before Shiro can caution him against it, he tears away, stalking further back into the store.

After a moment, Shiro follows behind him.

“He’s more of a window-shopper,” he says matter-of-factly, ghosting his hand between Lance’s shoulder blades as they continue to look around, “He won’t usually let me buy him more than lunch. He came very close once, when they had a sale on a really nice knife-sharpener, but he changed his mind at the last second. He’s weird about these sorts of things.”

Lance mutters about how Keith’s weird about a lot of things, before leaning down to inspect a tekko wrapped safely in sheer plastic. With a click of his tongue, he continues looking around.

Shiro looks around the store on his own for awhile, allowing Lance to scrutinize the stock alone while he wanders through all of Keith’s favorite aisles—wondering if it would ruin Lance’s surprise if he bought Keith that knife sharpener now, when he isn’t here to object.

Just as he’s locked in an intense mental battle, furiously contemplating the pros and cons of just sneaking the thing into Keith’s room and hoping that he doesn’t suspect anything when he finds it, a tap on his shoulder startles him.

He wheels around quickly, nearly dropping the knife kit in his haste.

And he’s greeted, to his great relief, not by the angry shopkeeper thinking that he’s up to no good, or even a peer of theirs from the Garrison, demanding to know how his request to leave got granted so soon—but Lance, grinning up at him from ear to ear, small a brown paper bag pressed under his arm to his chest.

“You won’t believe what I found,” he says, his voice trembling with excitement, “It’s so perfect, Shiro! He’s seriously going to die! Just you wait, you mullet-headed bastard! You think you can run away from me forever?!  _ You think anyone can stop themselves from falling in love with Lance McClain _ ?!”

He’s yelling in triumph all the way out into the street. Shiro wonders if loudness is really the blessing that he’d always thought that it would be.

Maybe, he thinks, they need to find a healthy medium. Maybe, they need to invite just one more person who isn’t at either end of the spectrum into their relationship to even things out.

Four seems like it might be pushing it, he realizes, but it’s a nice thought.

People are staring as Lance raises his hands above his head towards the sun, as they step onto the sidewalk and the bell rings behind them as the door closes.

“Just wait, Keith! Before you know it, you’ll be so in love with me that you’ll wish you were  _ dead _ !”

Shiro won’t figure out what the present is for a very long time. Lance will be purposefully vague, and later on, when he tries to pry the answer out of Keith, he’ll be so flustered that he’ll pretend that he has no idea what Shiro’s asking about.

But Lance is elated—walking on air, high above the clouds. He’s so proud of the tiny bag that he carries as though it’s the most fragile, most precious thing in the world. Shiro wonders if he knows that Keith is already in love with him—if he realizes that both of them have been head-over-heels so much longer than he could ever hope to understand.

It’ll spoil the fun if he clues him in now, he knows. It might dampen the surprise, when Lance tries to woo Keith and he realizes, so belatedly, that Keith’s intense, unyielding love isn’t the kind of love that one can see right away.

He leads Lance toward the town’s only bed and breakfast, tired in the heat, yearning for air conditioning and a soft bed, and finally, some time alone to make sure that Lance knows, at the very least, that Shiro is already so in love with him that he could die.

A romantic evening alone, with no prying eyes and no risk of getting caught. He’s looking forward to it already.

A private bathroom where they can shower together, a big bed where he can hold Lance close and do all of those filthy things with him that he’s been fantasizing about since they made these plans earlier in the week.

It’s going to be a good day, he thinks, a broad grin spreading over his cheeks.

A good day, a great night, and a beautiful morning—waking up with Lance in his arms.

 

* * *

 

Shiro shouldn’t be surprised, he really shouldn’t. After the pretty steady influx of the same western themed areas, decorations, and buildings that seemed to be all this dusty town had to offer, he should at this point, be expecting it.

It still doesn’t prepare him for the mess of the room they face when Lance excitedly swipes the card key into the lock and swings the door open.

The door bangs into the wall from the force, but neither of them really notice it. Lance is a mess of laughter within seconds, and all Shiro can do is gape from the doorway as he strides in and throws himself back onto the single hideous bed.

“Ready to have your way with me, cowboy?”

Lance winks, flipping to his side and propping his chin with one arm. Shiro’s gaze is drawn to the slinky way he’s stretched himself out, hip cocked a little heavily to the air, one leg slightly crossed over the other. Shiro considers, however, that maybe it would have been nice to have Keith along now, if at least for some semblance of sanity and backup.

He suppresses the groan he wants to let out, shuffling in and banging the door shut. Taking in a deep breath, he says, “Yes, but if you call me that again, then I’m not so sure that answer will remain the same…”

Lance’s lips fold into a pout. He looks genuinely a little disheartened. If Keith were here, there’s no doubt in Shiro’s mind that he’d definitely slap him for adding, after a moment’s pause and a long sigh, “... _ stud _ .”

Lance whoops to the air, making like he’s looping a lasso over his head and throwing it across the room to reel him in. Shiro is trying his best to be a good sport, but finds all he can really manage to do is walk stiffly towards the bed with a weak smile.

Luckily for him, Lance doesn’t seem as offended by his lack of enthusiasm there.

“Yeah, that’s the spirit! Let’s get this rodeo started.”

Lance kicks his shoes off in record time, pushing himself up and patting the spacious area next to him. Drawing one long, slim finger over the quilt that Shiro reluctantly plops himself down upon, Lance throws him a smoldering look from beneath lidded eyes. “So, who’s gonna cover the creepy horse’s eyes first before the adults play? He’s probably underage, we can’t expose him to that.”

Shiro feels like the creepy, silkscreened horse taking up half of the wall by the bed and staring directly at them is the least of their worries. There’s plenty of other things that could potentially deflate a boner in this room, and the horse isn’t particularly in the top three to him.

For some reason, there’s a genuine leather saddle, resting on an iron fixture by the bed. The sheets and pillows are a vomit-inducing, dizzying clash of paisleys and neon greens in checkered southern hospitality patterns on every inch they can be to disorient whatever poor soul happens to be sleeping on it. There’s a beady-eyed bull on the other side of the bed’s wall to compliment the horse, staring them down in a completely different way.

The doors leading to the bathroom are classic saloon style push doors. There’s fake straw lining the cupboards, twin steer skulls propped on the walls. Shiro feels like even with all of that awful bedding, there isn’t nearly enough here to use to cover up everything that is willing away his arousal.

“What?” Lance snorts, apparently aware of the uncertainty on his face as his eyes continue to take in the horrors around them. “Not ready to buckle down and ride this stud?”

Shiro cradles his face in the palms of his hands, finally letting loose that groan, and a warm weight pats him on the back.

“Too soon?” Lance asks softly, his palm turning from patting into small, soothing circles.

“Just… give me a minute,” Shiro hears himself croak, feeling a little better with the shield over his eyes. His breathing is evening out, turning into small chuckles instead as the hilarity of the situation belatedly hits him, especially as Lance scooches closer to him and settles his lips by his ear.

It’s just his luck that every attempt of his to woo someone always seems to go awry, that every classic bit of romance left in him gets turned into some farmer’s kitschy wet dream. But Lance is a special kind of person. He takes things like this in stride.

The eager erection pushing up against his thigh should probably be raising more questions than answering them, but as Lance nips at his ear, Shiro can’t really judge when the light touches slipping from his back to his chest pull a groan out of him that’s entirely different from the one before.

It’s easier to succumb to the pleasure, his eyes still darkened between the folds of his hands. He keeps them closed as he raises his head back when Lance moves from his ear to his neck, skimming his tongue sloppily down over his quickening pulse.

The teeth biting down into his neck shouldn’t surprise him as much as they do, really, as he takes a moment to calm himself down. It’s the first thing that Keith really taught Lance about him, and maybe one of his biggest turn-ons, but he doesn’t want to spoil Lance’s steady pace here by getting too excited too soon.

They have more time here than they did on the practice ship, and while his erection is already beginning to beg for attention, he’s determined to enjoy every minute of this.

When Lance pulls away from him, unsure as his nervousness and inexperience finally catch up with him, Shiro takes the opportunity to scoot back and lay him down gently. Lance allows himself to be moved, so unlike Keith, so pliable and so willing to go along with anything as long as he gets the results that he wants.

It’s nice, even if it’s incredibly intimidating. Even if he realizes suddenly, with growing anxiety, that it’s his job tonight to lead the way without forcing someone else to take the charge and call the shots.

Lance watches him with glassy eyes, his lips open slightly in a small, mischievous smile as Shiro fumbles around in his pockets.

He’d felt like a total pervert for sneaking the tiny bottle of lube from his bedside drawer into his pocket and carrying it around with him all day today, but now that the time has come to actually use it, he knows that he was right to come prepared.

Lance’s eyes widen ever-so slightly at the sight of it, but his smile is still there. Shiro tries not to stare at the bulge tenting the front of his pants for too long, tries not to get so wrapped up in the moment that he forgets that he’s supposed to move.

He sets the bottle down next to Lance, pushes himself off of the bed and takes off his jacket, unbuckles his belt, undresses just enough that he doesn’t feel so stiff and confined here. And Lance lets out a low, sultry noise as he steps out of his pants, standing at the foot of the bed in just his boxers and undershirt while Lance lays there, still fully dressed.

After taking another moment to work away his anxiety and allow himself to get worked up again, Shiro presses a knee against the mattress, between Lance’s ankles. He pulls himself toward Lance, hovers just above him, and braces his weight against one hand as the other begins unbuttoning Lance’s jacket.

Lance kisses him. He runs those eager, hungry fingers up under his shirt, drags blunted nails over his belly, up to his chest. He bucks up just as Shiro pulls open his jacket, puffing out big breaths of air and closing his eyes.

“Sh-Shiro, I—” he bites down on his bottom lip, tilting his head to the side as color stains his cheeks. “I don’t… I don’t know if I’m ready for—for  _ everything _ .”

Shiro pulls back slightly, stills his hand as it moves downward to unbuckle Lance’s belt. He swallows thickly, unsure of what to do and where to go from here, what he should do in a situation like this when Keith was always so eager to push things forward.

He isn’t angry with Lance, and he isn’t disappointed, but he wonders, nervously, if maybe he’s pushed the envelope too far, too soon, and scared Lance with his own eagerness.

“I-I mean.” Lance gulps, furrowing his brow as his cheeks grow ever-pinker. “I still wanna do stuff, but I don’t know about…  _ sex _ .”

Lance says the word just like he says Keith’s name sometimes—like it’s a particularly ugly curse word that he can’t quite wrap his tongue around. Like he should feel ashamed just for thinking about it.

Shiro hadn’t even thought about going all the way tonight, but he knows better than to tell this to Lance. He’d considered the possibility so impossible, in fact, that he hadn’t even thought about bringing condoms. As far as Lance is concerned, however, they might as well be hiding in his uniform pockets on the floor.

He doesn’t want to hurt Lance’s feelings by telling him,  _ “I wouldn’t want to do that without Keith around” _ , so he opts to keep his mouth shut.

Instead, he nods, smiling as reassuring and comforting and he can manage, and dips in to plant a gentle kiss on Lance’s lips.

“I understand,” he says, “we should definitely take things slow.”

And slowly, just as he’d promised, he begins kissing from Lance’s jaw down to his throat, from his throat into the dip of his collarbone—traveling further and further down until he’s tucked between Lance’s knees with his lips brushing the rough edge of Lance’s pantline.

He resumes fiddling with Lance’s belt until he finally works the clasp of it free, tugging at it slightly to work it apart before making clumsy work of unbuttoning the fly one-handed. Lance doesn’t seem to notice how awkward he is at this, and he appreciates that more than anything right now.

Keith would probably make some kind of rude joke or blunt suggestion. Not out of meanness, he knows, but sometimes Keith doesn’t exactly understand the subtle nuances of conversation. Sometimes he doesn’t completely comprehend the idea that filling an awkward silence with awkward words isn’t the best way to remedy the situation.

But Lance is sometimes cool where Keith is smoldering steam. Lance is the ice that soothes the burn, that forces him to stop and calm down before getting so wrapped up in his own insecurity and shortcomings that he eagerly relinquishes control to someone else.

And he realizes, in this moment—as Lance lets out little hisses of pleasure through the gaps between his teeth pressed hard into his bottom lip—that Keith has allowed him to be himself all these years without ever questioning all of his idiosyncrasies and private hangups. Keith accepts everything at face value—takes in his flaws and never forces him to change. It’s been comfortable with Keith, safe. He’s never felt the need to be a better person, to change himself or push himself to be anything but the person who he secretly dislikes.

Keith is a comfort, he knows. A security blanket. He’s dependant on Keith—on their stable relationship, on the fact that they both know each other so well. He’s allowed himself to stagnate in their relationship, to fall into a comfortable but cowardly routine that he knows Keith would never even think to shake up, and neither would he.

But Lance has been challenging the both of them since he stumbled in on their relationship. Without realizing it, he’s shaken things up so dramatically that Shiro isn’t even entirely sure who either of them are anymore.

Before tonight, he would have fumbled with the idea of controlling anything.

He would have faltered and failed if someone asked him to take the lead. He would have laughed at the mere idea of it. He would have thought back to all of his terrible mistakes and missteps the very first time that he slept with Keith, and he would have immediately drawn deep inside of himself and refused to even try.

But Lance doesn’t know any of this.

Lance only wants to be touched by him, to be loved by him, and he’s waiting so patiently—so quietly, so eagerly.

And tonight, Shiro wants to do everything in his power not to let him down.

He flicks his gaze up, catching Lance’s eye, and he doesn’t break that connection, even as his fingers pull apart Lance’s fly and ghost over the firm bulge beneath it.

Lance’s eyelids are low—his lashes casting long shadows over his cheeks. His lips are red and swollen from kissing, worried under nervous teeth. He’s barely concealing all of the little gasps and moans that Shiro has grown so familiar hearing so much quicker than he thought that he would have. His wrists are pressed into his chest, his fingers curled in toward his palms as he struggles to uphold the casual sort of demeanor that he must be thinking might impress Shiro right now.  

But Shiro wants to make him come unwound. He wants to watch as all of that shaky control uncoils, as he’s worked so beautifully under Shiro’s hands that he can’t even bring himself to keep up this facade anymore.

Lance has no idea how beautiful he is like this. If Shiro were to really think about it, he might realize that Lance has no idea how beautiful he is at any point in time—how he’s captured both Shiro and Keith’s attention and held it on him with an ease that’s startled both of them.

How he’s akin to the ocean—so gorgeous and captivating. So far away and untouchable. So alluring when he’s worked himself up—and especially then.

Shiro tells himself to stop dwelling on all of these sappy, poetic thoughts. He tells himself that the time for musing Lance’s beauty is definitely not while he’s tucked himself between his thighs.

His fingers pull Lance’s erection out of the gap in his boxers, but as a second thought, he decides instead to work his pants down over his hips. He brought the lube tonight for a reason, he tells himself. He wanted to try something new here—something that might not be quite as easy back on the Garrison compound, where time alone is a luxury that each of them gave up when they enrolled.

“Sh-Shiro,” Lance gasps, raising his hips dutifully as Shiro tugs his pants down to his knees and over his ankles, disposing them on the floor by his feet, “Th—the horse is watching us.”

Shiro lets out a miserable groan. He doesn’t look at the horse and he pretends that it isn’t there at all. Instead, he reaches silently for the lube, popping open the cap and drizzling a little over his fingers.

He props himself more comfortably on the corner of the bed: one foot on the floor, one knee on the mattress. Lance’s head is tipped back, his eyes trained on the ever-watchful cutout of the horse. He’s so busy staring at it that he jolts in surprise when Shiro wraps his unlubed palm around his erection, steadying himself awkwardly on his elbow.

“It—it’s kinda… _ kinky _ , d-don’t ya think?”

Shiro resists the urge to roll his eyes.

“Don’t worry about the horse, Lance.” His voice is practiced in how even it is. He forces himself not to allude to his annoyance, or his absolute horror at the sight of this room. “Just focus on me, okay? The horse might as well not even be here.”

His lube-slicked fingers pry between Lance’s cheeks, gentle and careful. Lance sucks in a lungful of air, shuddering slightly—his head snapping back toward Shiro, his eyes dark and hazy as he bites down again on his bottom lip.

“Is this okay?” Shiro asks him, pausing until he receives a nod. “Let me know if you want me to stop.”

With that, he presses his fingers further forward, drawing small circles around Lance’s perineum before slowly dipping one inside, just to the first knuckle. Lance lets out a small hiss, closing his knees ever-so slightly and arching his back. He curses under his breath, and Shiro smiles.

He wonders if this is the first time that Lance has ever felt this sort of sensation—if this is his first time ever going this far.

He reminds himself of Lance’s outburst back on the practice ship. He tells himself that it’s going to be okay, that he can do this. He can make Lance’s first time a memorable one. He can pull this off without messing it up.

He leans forward, planting a kiss against Lance’s thigh before dipping his head further down. His lips find the head of Lance’s erection automatically. He places a kiss there too, before poking out an eager tongue and dragging it around.

He raises his gaze to meet Lance’s eyes before taking it into his mouth. He wants to watch as his expression melts from trepidation to pleasure. He wants to make sure that all of this is okay.

Lance is watching him with glazed, half-lidded eyes. He presses his finger even deeper inside.

He’s rewarded with a low groan—and he moves, gradually. He pumps his finger in and out, bobbing his head and taking as much of Lance into the back of his throat as he can manage without gagging.

Lance is writhing beneath him, trembling hard and reaching down to comb his fingers through his hair. He tugs at it, just as Shiro drags a flat tongue over the underside of his cock, as he wriggles his finger around inside of him and finds his prostate.

Without really thinking about it, he reaches his free hand between his own thighs, tugging his erection free of his boxers and stroking himself. He’s propped against the mattress precariously now, but he doesn’t think too much about how easy it would be to topple over, or how cramped his knee feels as it holds the majority of his weight.

He only focuses on the noises that Lance is making right now, and how he’s shaking, how he seems to be getting close to cumming already.

He allows himself to feel cocky, to slip another finger inside. He pulls back his head and sucks lightly on the tip of Lance’s erection, drags his spaded tongue over the slit of it.

Lance arches high, drops his hands from Shiro’s hair and grips the sheets. He jolts then, as his orgasm ripples through him.

And loudly—so loud that Shiro worries momentarily that someone might call and complain—he bellows out a name.

It isn’t “Shiro”, and it isn’t even “Takashi”.

But somehow, it’s even better.

“O-oh, God, I-I—K- _ Keith _ !”

He isn’t sure why Lance calling out Keith’s name sends him over the edge as well. He isn’t sure why his ego isn’t bruised and he isn’t feeling like maybe he doesn’t actually have as stable of a place in this relationship as he’d originally thought.

He only thinks about what Keith would think if he were here right now. How maybe Lance is imagining Keith tucked away in the corner instead of that horrible horse—watching them with the same unyielding gaze, startled and flustered as both of them cum just thinking about him.

Lance’s breathing evens out gradually. Shiro will never be sure if he remembers calling out Keith’s name, if maybe he’s so mortified that he never brings it up again, or if maybe he’d been so caught up in his own fantasies and Shiro’s fingers inside of him to think too clearly.

But Shiro doesn’t plan on ever asking him about it anyway.

He pulls himself away, spits in the trash can in the bathroom and helps clean Lance up with one of the towels from the rack.  

The horse and the bull watch him, but he’s too elated to care.

He turns off the light and tucks himself under the blankets with Lance.

And he tells himself that next time, they’ll come back here with Keith, and maybe then, he’ll get to experience all of this as well.

 

* * *

 

“Bojangles, “Lance says through a yawn, backing up and pressing his back as firmly against Shiro’s chest as he can manage, “That’s a southern-sounding name, isn’t it?”

Shiro stifles a laugh, pressing his lips against Lance’s shoulder and wrapping his arms more tightly around his waist under the blankets.

“Sounds kind of like a jazz musician from the 1920s to me.”

He can’t see Lance’s face from where he’s lying, but he can imagine the way that he’s screwing up his face right now—jutting out his lips in that adorable little pout of his and lowering his brows in thought.

“Nah, I think it sounds like an old Hollywood cowboy or something. ‘ _ This town ain’t big enough for the two of us, Mister Bojangles _ ’!”

In the dark, Shiro can barely make out the silhouette of the horse in the corner and the black blob of the bull’s head on the wall. He watches the splashes of light from the window crawling over the walls, listens to the sound of Lance’s breathing evening out as he slips further and further into a tempting sleep.

He yawns quietly, burying his face in the crook of Lance’s shoulder, wondering what the familiar smell that clings to him might be. It’s sweeter and less abrasive than the tobacco-scent that’s buried itself in all of Keith’s clothing, into the fibers of his hair and the bitter bite of his lips. It’s so subtle that he barely notices it at first, but it brings back many memories of playing in the courtyard of his apartment complex as a kid.

“Bojangles is a good name for a horse, Shiro. I’d name a horse Bojangles if I had one.”

Barely paying attention, it takes Shiro a moment to realize what Lance is getting at.

“Please tell me you aren’t going to name that terrible horse, Lance.”

Lance tenses up in his arms, craning his neck and shifting around to look at him.

“And so what if I am?” He snaps, “It’s a cool horse! You’re telling me that you don’t wanna try to smuggle Bojangles out of here and show him to Keith?”

“Go to sleep, Lance,” Shiro says softly, pushing down his laughter and pulling Lance against him again, “I’m sure Bojangles will visit you in your dreams. I know he’ll definitely be in my nightmares.”

And he realizes, as Lance grumbles himself to sleep, that he smells like suntan lotion.

He smells of summer, of long days playing in the sprinklers and picking wild flowers at the park.

He smells of an innocence that Shiro hasn’t revisited in many, many years.

Of a hope that he’s long-since forgotten. Of ice cream trucks circling the block, of the hot sizzle of concrete under his toes—of warm beach sand and parasols of many colors. Of the comforting shade under the many trees in the park, where he’d kissed Keith many times before he went away for the very first time.

Where they’d grown older and further apart—where he’d told Keith that he was going away to join the Galaxy Garrison. Where they’d climbed to the top of that old oak tree as kids, and Keith had later carved their initials into the bark.

He falls asleep thinking of all of these things, of the past that he’s grown too big for. Of the life that he’s leaving behind.

And he wonders, just as he slips into his dreams, how comfortably Lance will fit into that life once he returns from Kerberos, and how many memories they’ll make without him when he’s gone.

He dreams about Keith’s smiling face in a faraway summer, of how the peach-colored band aids had stood out against his sun-kissed skin. He dreams about visiting the beach with his mother and brother when he was thirteen—how he’d sent Keith a postcard with a cat in a sunhat, how the card had gotten lost in the mail, and he hadn’t actually received it until the winter, when Shiro had been back for weeks.

And he dreams about a younger version of Lance, with his fingers linked with theirs, his initials etched just beneath theirs in the bark of that old tree.

He dreams of the inky black of the night sky—of far-off galaxies, of casting away into the blanks between the constellations, burying himself into the ellipses of the stars—in a long pause of his life between now and the many months before he finally comes home.

And he dreams, just before he awakens to the harsh light of the morning sun, of Keith and Lance existing somewhere in that pause—growing closer without him, filling up the gap of his absence until there isn’t any room for him anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this week’s chapter is the very last one that Lemon contributed to. I really hope that you guys enjoyed her parts of this story! There’s a little bit of Lemon in here, a little bit of me… but after this week, I hope you guys are ready for a very Mothy remainder of 2017.


	15. Serendipitous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shiro and Lance still have yet to find a limit to their love.

Lance sits in a tangle of sheets on his bed, bathed in the soft light of early afternoon as he turns a small, brown package over in his hands.

Hunk is reading quietly at the desk between their bed, his headphones buzzing in his ears as he flips idly through the pages. He hasn’t asked Lance how his date with Shiro went yesterday, or how it might have felt to wake up together this morning. He hasn’t even feigned curiosity about the gift that Lance can’t stop looking at.

He’d only welcomed Lance back with that same friendly smile and a clap on the back, before ushering him into their room to try the guacamole bites that he’d apparently just perfected last night.

They were delicious, of course, and Hunk’s company has slowly become one of the few consistent comforts in Lance’s life that never yields any surprises. He isn’t too nosy and he never pushes too hard. Maybe he can tell by the new assortment of love marks on Lance’s neck, mingling with the old, faded bruises from before. Maybe he just knew because of the tell-tale bounce in Lance’s step, or the tender way that he’d sat down on the bed, unable to keep himself from letting out a small hiss of pain at the sensation of his noticeably overworked backside pressing down on the stiff surface of a military-grade mattress.

And it was probably a combination of all of those things, if he’s completely honest with himself. He’s never been very good at hiding the truth from anyone but himself, and Hunk—after Keith, maybe, with those hot-coal eyes of his—is the most perceptive person that he knows.

One look at him was surely all that it took to give Hunk all of the answers that he needed and so much more.

“Say, Hunk,” he says slowly, his voice so light and far away, as though he truly is sitting high above his own body with his head in the clouds, “have you ever been in love before?”

Hunk stifles a laugh, and it’s bashful, he can tell. After a short stretch of silence, Hunk’s voice lilts under the weight of his nerves. He doesn’t pull his nose out of his book, even as he plucks the headphones from his ears, but even from his awkward spot on his bed, Lance can’t miss the color staining his cheeks.

“I’ve never been very popular with chicks, man.”

Lance reels back, dropping his hands and the package in his lap and staring at Hunk incredulously for such a long amount of time that Hunk finally peers meekly over the edge of his book in his direction.

“Are you serious?” Lance asks, a crack at the end of his words—his indignation getting the best of him. “You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re a genius in the kitchen—what more could a girl want?”

Hunk chuckles, scooting back in his seat and turning to face him. They stare at each other for a split second—in which Lance scrutinizes Hunk’s appearance, searching for anything that might turn a prospective girlfriend off, wondering if Hunk is just making up excuses when he’s so obviously married to his books and his mechanics.

“I don’t know man, I guess girls like guys who are actually, you know, cool and brave, and didn’t have a reputation all through school for throwing up at the top of the ferris wheel in third grade. Who knew?”

Although Hunk lets out another laugh, Lance isn’t quite sure what’s so funny about any of this. He thinks about all of the dumb things that he did as a kid—all of the reputations that preceded him all the way into adulthood. He wonders what Keith and Shiro would think if they knew that he’d broken his arm three times in the same place on the same set of monkey bars, that he’d cried when he found out that his grade school teacher was married because he thought that he was in love with her, that he was so afraid of the vacuum cleaner as a child that his mother used to threaten to clean the carpets when he was being bad.

And he wonders if these embarrassing stories could really change things for him, if Shiro and Keith would turn up their noses and reject him, after all of this time and all of the things that they’ve been through together. He wonders if the two of them know all of each other’s humiliating stories, if he’s really so far behind them that he can never hope to rise high enough to stand on equal ground.

“Why are you asking about that anyway, dude? Are you gonna pop the question to one of your boyfriends or something?”

Lance sends Hunk a sharp glare, fingering the edges of the package as heat rises to his cheeks. Baby steps, he tells himself. It’s way too early for anything like marriage—and how would that even work? Who would stand at the altar and who would walk down the aisle? How could they ever hope to feed each other cake at the reception with three arms instead of only two?

He shakes his head, cursing his short attention span as his thoughts start wandering to how nice both Keith and Shiro would look all dressed in white—regardless of how little they would actually deserve to wear it.

“O-of course not, I just—I… I’m just not used to all of this. It’s weird going from nothing to like, double. I’m not even sure what to expect at this point.”

Hunk scoots his chair awkwardly across the floor, resting a gentle hand on Lance’s shoulder, his eyes soft and smile lazy and reassuring.

“You’re gonna do fine, man,” he says softly, “and whatever that is, I’m sure Keith’s gonna love it.”

 

* * *

 

Keith’s roommate is just leaving as Shiro makes it to their dorm. He offers nothing but a small smile as he holds open the door. He nods in return as Shiro greets him and slings his bag over his shoulder, before making his way down the hall in the direction of the library.

They don’t talk much, as far as Shiro knows. Keith’s roommate is a studious fighter pilot just a few ranks below him, and Keith himself isn’t the type of person to indulge in small-talk even on his best days. He doesn’t talk to anyone in his classes, and from what Shiro has come to understand, he doesn’t have any friends but himself and Lance.

He knows that Keith’s reputation has evolved into its own tangible being at this point—a specter looming over his head at all times, chasing away any chance that he might have of making friends with any of his classmates, guaranteeing that unknowing onlookers will always regard his roommate and those few close to him with nothing but pity.

And it’s funny, in a way, Shiro thinks, because he knows that Keith is a quiet roommate. He keeps to himself, doesn’t study too late at night. He keeps his side of the room meticulously clean, always noiseless when he sneaks in long after curfew and leaves for early cram sessions in the library each morning.

A model housemate, Shiro thinks, and a better boyfriend than Shiro thinks he might actually deserve. It’s a shame that people can’t look beyond Keith’s stony exterior, that they won’t ever take the time to peel back his many layers and witness the true warmth that hides deep inside of him.

But it’s the hand that Keith’s been dealt in this world, as disappointing as that may be. And Keith himself doesn’t pay it any mind, if he even notices it at all.

Keith is doing homework at the desk between both beds as Shiro slips inside, shutting the door gently behind him. He doesn’t look up and he doesn’t speak, but Shiro knows that he heard him come in just fine. Keith’s senses are extraordinarily sharp at all times—sharper, Shiro thinks, than what might even be humanly possible.

He’s known Keith long enough that he’s stopped wondering about it, but he isn’t sure if Lance has even had the chance to notice yet. How sometimes Keith will sense someone before they’re close enough to hear, how he can find just about anything in the dark. How when something’s missing, Keith has an eerie sense about it, how he’s always been able to track something down even if he doesn’t know what it is yet. When they were kids, Shiro’s mom had misplaced her keys before work and Keith had found them buried in the laundry basket in two minutes flat. She’d brushed it off as though it was nothing but dumb luck, but to Shiro, that had only been the beginning of a long series of troubling talents that he’d come to discover in Keith.

He wonders then, if Keith can sense something within Lance as well, because he’s always known about other people. He can sniff out a liar from a mile away. He can see through any facade effortlessly, can reach deep down into a person’s heart and weigh the good and the bad without needing more than a single look at them.

Maybe that’s how he knew that Lance was worth their time. Maybe that’s why he allowed Shiro’s crush to flourish without immediately stamping it out.

“So you’re back from your romantic weekend away.”

Shiro jumps just a little, his heart leaping up into his throat as he watches Keith’s shoulders stiffen in his chair. He still doesn’t turn around, and for whatever reason, this puts Shiro on edge.

He couldn’t tell Keith why they’d made such quick plans to go away on such short notice when he warned him that they’d be away. He can’t tell him, even now, what they were doing while they were gone. He knows that it must have hurt Keith’s feelings when they left without him, and he knows that he can’t possibly understand why.

He wonders, guiltily, if Keith thinks that he did something wrong. There’s no way of knowing, no way to ask that might actually yield an answer, so instead, he moves further into the room, until he’s close enough to Keith’s back that he can wrap his arms around him.

Keith stiffens even more in his arms, dragging in a sharp breath but saying nothing else. He’s annoyed, Shiro can tell. He’s determined that if he stays quiet enough, Shiro will get sick of this and leave him alone.

Biting his lip, Shiro leans forward to press his face into Keith’s hair. It’s freshly clean, still a little damp from the shower. He should know better than to think that way after all of this time. He should know that Shiro will still stick around, no matter how unruly and angry he gets.

They’re stuck together forever, he thinks. No matter how near they are or how far away, Shiro doesn’t think that he can ever let Keith go completely.

“We had a good time,” Shiro tells him, his words muffled, “But it would have been better if you’d been there too.”

Keith snorts, turning the page of his workbook as roughly as he can manage. They both know what he wants to say, even if he doesn’t say it.

_‘Why didn’t you invite me then?’_

Shiro hunches further down, kissing the nape of Keith’s neck all the way down to his shoulder. He’s only wearing his undershirt right now, a short-sleeved, thin black thing with a wide enough neck that Shiro has a long stretch of skin to run his lips over—but before he can take advantage of this, Keith shrugs him off and pushes himself out of his chair.

With a few stiff steps, he paces over to his bed and throws himself down onto it, the mattress creaking beneath his weight. He sends Shiro a hard glare, as though warning him not to move forward, as though he’ll actually do anything if Shiro comes over anyway.

Shiro scrunches his brows, an apologetic smile tugging at his lips. He shoves his hands in his uniform pockets, tipping down his head and flicking his gaze to the floor between his feet.

He tries very hard to look as pitiful as possible. Keith will know that he’s faking this, but he won’t be able to resist the puppy-dog eyes either, Shiro knows from many years of experience.

And right now, he’s willing to take advantage of that in order to make things up to Keith.

Keith scowls back at him, shuffling further onto the bed and sitting cross-legged. There’s a glower on his face so hot that Shiro can feel it burning over his skin, his fingers digging into each knee as he refuses to break eye contact. He seems to know fully well that if he lets his guard down, Shiro is going to make some kind of move to sit with him, but at the same time, Shiro can already see his resolve crumbling as they continue to stare at each other.

After a long stretch of silence, Keith sighs, closing his eyes tiredly, and leaning back against the wall as though he’s given up.

“Fine,” he grumbles, “If you wanna come over here so badly, just… sit down.”

It takes everything inside of Shiro not to let out a triumphant cheer. Instead, he bites harder into his lip, strutting over and plopping down on the mattress just a few inches away from Keith’s feet.

He watches Keith’s closed eyes, the subtle color on his cheeks, the stiff line of his shoulders. He watches the way that his chest rises and falls beneath his shirt, how his fingers slacken against his knees and his muscles smooth out. For a moment, he sits completely still and quiet, as though he’s taking a moment to meditate away all of his ill feelings.

“I really do wish that you could have come,” Shiro says finally, the remorse in his voice entirely real, “I’m sorry, but… there was a good reason for that, I promise.”

Keith cracks open an eye, staring at Shiro down the straight bridge of his nose. It’s obvious that he doesn’t believe any of that, but even still, Shiro can tell that he’s having a hard time not forgiving him anyway.

“You didn’t want me to drag you guys to that thrift store, right? The one with the knives. Lance would have thought that was boring. It would have ruined your date.”

Shiro’s heart pinches. He looks away from Keith then, and he knows it’s a bad move. He knows that Keith can tell immediately that they went there, and that he feels even guiltier now, without even saying it. He can hear Keith’s breath hitch then, as he scoots just a little bit further away, far enough to the other end of the bed that Shiro can’t reach him anymore.

When Shiro finds the nerve to look back at Keith, he’s sitting in the furthest corner of the bed against the wall, his arms crossed over his knees, his face pressed into them. Shiro can only see his eyes glaring down at the sheets, and his brows drawn low in anger—but he knows better than to think that there isn’t hurt there, that Keith isn’t pursing his lips in that same uncomfortable, silent show of misery, how he always does when he doesn’t want to admit that something has bruised his ego.

“Keith, it wasn’t like that… You know that we both love you, okay? I can’t tell you why we left without you, but it wasn’t because we didn’t want you there. Honestly, I… I missed you the entire time.”

When Keith doesn’t respond for a few agonizing minutes, Shiro lets out a soft sigh, knowing very well that no amount of sad looks will mend the damage that he’s already done to this conversation. He pulls himself further onto the bed, scooting himself until he’s sitting with his back against the wall, just close enough that he can reach out and place a comforting hand on Keith’s shoulder, but still far enough away that he doesn’t trap him here.

When they were kids, he didn’t know better than to give Keith space. It took a few suckerpunches and a few unfortunate black eyes for him to finally get the picture—that a caged animal will always lash out when feeling threatened, and while he doesn’t like the idea of anyone calling Keith an animal, well… He still opts to give him room to run away if he needs to.

With gentle fingers, he reaches from Keith’s shoulders to thread his fingers through his hair. It pulls a little, still damp, and he apologizes softly. Despite the sour look on his face, Keith leans up into his touch, and again, for the second time since he came in here, Shiro feels a twinge in his chest.

Keith gets lonely when he isn’t around. No one but Lance and himself have touched him in years. He almost comes clean, almost tells Keith everything if only to soothe his awful mood, but he knows better than that. He knows that Lance’s plans are important to him, and that they’ll all benefit from this if he pulls it off.

And he knows that it will all be worth it in the end, and that Keith can’t possibly have any hard feelings once everything is said and done.

“You know that I love you, Keith. And Lance loves you too. We wouldn’t have left you behind if it wasn’t important. I’ll explain everything later, okay?”

Keith closes his eyes, letting out a long breath that’s muffled in his arms. He settles down a little, slumping against the wall as Shiro’s fingers comb through his hair up to his scalp and scratch lightly, in the same way that he knows Keith can’t resist even when he’s angry like this.

Finally, after a short stretch of silence, Keith’s eyes open, flicking up to meet his. Color pools his cheeks.

“...Did Lance hate the weapon store?” he asks softly, and the hesitant excitement in his voice causes a wide, loving smile to break out over Shiro’s lips.

“No,” Shiro laughs, “I mean, he wasn’t nearly as into it as you are, but I think he left pretty happy.”

Keith snorts, raising his head and resting it firmer against Shiro hand. He isn’t smiling, but Shiro can tell that he’s already starting to feel better. It’s a funny thought, that Lance enjoying his favorite store might actually make him happy—the idea that someone else might be able to grasp his love for combat that so many others don’t ever seem to understand.

“You guys stayed at that hotel, right? The one in the middle of town?”

At the mention of the bed and breakfast, Shiro can’t help but groan. His fingers continue to work through Keith’s hair, but for a moment, he stops only to lament the nightmare of the horse in the corner, and all of those awful patterns that are still branded in the back of his mind.

“Yes, we did,” he croaks, “Lance… kept making cowboy puns. It wasn’t nearly as nice as it looks outside.”

Finally, a smile breaks out over Keith’s face. He bites his lip to suppress his laughter, turning his head so that Shiro can reach around to the other side.

“I could’ve told you that it was going to be bad, but was it really _that_ bad?”

Shiro leans forward, pulling his hand away from Keith’s hair and pressing a kiss against the notch between his shoulder and throat.

“Without you? Yeah, it was Hell.”

Keith chokes a laugh, but he doesn’t stop Shiro from moving further forward and continuing to kiss his skin. He allows Shiro to turn him around to face him, doesn’t protest when Shiro leans in to capture his lips in a gentle, apologetic kiss. His hands come up to drag over Shiro’s chest, fiddling with the buttons on the front of his uniform and popping a few of them as they travel further and further up.

“Don’t tell me you guys didn’t actually sleep together,” Keith breathes against his lips, “Or are you already excited again?”

“I missed you,” Shiro groans, and that’s enough for Keith. He doesn’t push him away when Shiro grasps him by the hips, pulling him back and laying him flat on the bed. He watches silently as Shiro works open his belt, pulling his pants down over his ankles and tossing them on the floor.

He isn’t sure how much longer Keith’s roommate is going to be gone, but he hopes, desperately, that he gives them enough time to do this before he comes back. The last thing that either of them need is anyone finding out about this.

He doesn’t get rid of Keith’s boxers right away, but instead opts to lean forward and kiss him again, his weight braced on one arm as he reaches the other down to fondle Keith’s awakening erection through the fabric.

“He called out for you, you know,” Shiro draws out, breathy and as seductive as he can manage, “When I was touching him, he said your name…”

Keith lets out a shuddered groan, turning his pink cheeks away from Shiro, his eyes glassy and unfocused and Shiro begins nibbling at his neck.

His cock grows harder immediately, and Shiro knows that he’s done something very, very right.

“He’s a lot louder than you. I thought that he might have been making so much noise that he’d get us kicked out.”

He slips Keith through the slit of his boxers, stroking him languidly, listening to all of the tiny noises that are, for once, filling the air around them. He still isn’t sure why the thought of Lance makes Keith so much more confident about the sounds that he makes, but he’s more than willing to take advantage of that.

“S-so,” Keith pauses to swallow, composing himself with a deep breath as he continues not quite meeting Shiro’s eyes, “So you did… mess around then.”

“Of course we did.” Shiro’s pumping him a little quicker now, but the moment that his hips buck up, he pulls his hand away. “He makes a lot of noise.”

Keith lets out a desperate sort of whimper at the words, snapping his eyes closed, his brows tight. Shiro leans back onto his knees, grasping the bottom of Keith’s shirt and easing it up. As he pulls it over his head, he comes forward to plant a series of small kisses along his chest, pausing only to nip lightly at his nipple, enjoying the sweet, low groan that this draws out of Keith’s throat.

He leaves Keith’s shirt tangled around his wrists, and after a moment of thought, he twists it around a few more times until it’s pulled tighter—tight enough that Keith can’t free himself even as he weakly tests his new bindings.

“This is… _new_.” He croaks, but Shiro doesn’t miss the lust in his eyes, the hunger that swims around in the dark depths of his growing pupils.

Shiro stretches over to the nightstand then, pulling open the drawer and digging around blindly. Keith doesn’t keep much of anything in here—just some supplies for class and the knife that Shiro’s never seen him actually unsheath, despite how long he’s carried it around—so he finds the bottle that he was searching for easily.

Keith lets out a short, staggered breath as he watches, as though he’s just now realized how far Shiro is willing to take this when they surely have so little privacy for so little time.

He wonders, briefly, how it might feel to get Keith alone in a hotel room as he did with Lance. He wonders if Keith would be confident enough to scream for him like Lance did, if he’d make those same noises and say his name—and maybe even _Lance’s_ —with that same reckless abandon.

He shuts the drawer hastily, steadying himself on his knees and setting the lube beside Keith’s face. Keith stares at it for a long time, even as Shiro pulls his boxers down awkwardly, shifting his weight from knee to knee as he tugs them all the way over Keith’s ankles. He wonders if Keith is embarrassed, being so exposed while Shiro is still fully dressed. He wonders if Keith likes him more when he’s in uniform—if he gets off on making him squirm when he’s so properly dressed.

“Do you know what I was doing to him when he said your name?” Shiro asks, falling back down onto his arm against the bed, taking Keith in his palm and working his erection at a slow, painful pace. “Do you want to know what I was doing while he was thinking of you…?”

Keith’s resounding moan is a short, squeaky sound. His breathing is erratic, his chest rising and falling rapidly as he snaps his gaze back toward Shiro and pulls himself up to kiss him again.

“Stop talking about yesterday and just _fuck me_ already,” Keith hisses, his words molten, before he jerks his head in the direction of the lube. “Just take that, use it, and _fuck me_ , okay?!”

Shiro’s heart leaps into his throat, his cheeks hot. He nods dumbly, wondering idly if Keith might still be mad at him. He reaches blindly for the lube and leans back to his knees, working the lid open. Keith’s erection is dreadfully hard between his knees, precum dotting the tip. He watches it bobbing in the air as he dribbles the lube over his fingers, and he realizes, belatedly, that Keith isn’t angry.

No, he’s overcome with need.

He’s desperate, because of Shiro’s actions and Shiro’s words, and he isn’t willing to let anything get in the way of what he wants now.

With a gulp, and a stirring of his own erection, bound uncomfortably in his pants, Shiro tells himself that he’ll give Keith exactly what he needs.

Just… in his own time.

With his unlubed hand, Shiro unzips his fly, popping the button and letting out a short sigh as his erection slips free. Keith’s eyes watch it as it tumbles out, his tongue poking out to wet his lips. Briefly, Shiro loses his resolve, flustered by those eyes watching him so hungrily. He feels, for a moment, like a kid wearing his parent’s clothes. Like a small, useless person only putting on the facade of a man who can touch someone like Keith Kogane and actually make him feel good.

Keith is so much better at this than he is, always has been. He’s always been more than willing to be sexy unabashedly, to say filthy things that drive Shiro wild, to touch him and push him all the way to the edge without forcing him to fall down alone.

He tells himself, nervously, that he just needs to be like Keith right now. He needs to do this without breaking. He needs to show Keith, and himself, that he can be dominant without shirking away. He can do this.

Keith _wants_ him to do this.

With his newfound self-confidence, Shiro drops back down, backing up to sit between Keith’s spread legs, raising a hand to stroke his thigh. Keith is watching him quietly, breath heavy and labored as he allows Shiro to move him around, as though he’s curiously waiting for whatever Shiro has in store for him.

Slowly, Shiro presses his fingers between Keith’s legs, massaging his perineum for only a moment before pushing one finger inside of him. Keith lets out a soft bite of a moan, his brows knitted together as he digs his teeth into his lip. Shiro feels another swell of confidence at the sounds that he’s dragging out, telling himself that Keith isn’t the sort of person to give him such compliments if he didn’t deserve them.

He dips forward, his face mere centimeters from the head of Keith’s erection, and beyond it, he meets Keith’s glossy, unfocused eyes.

He pulls his finger out only slightly before pumping back inside, taking in the sweet hitch of Keith’s breath, adding another maybe too soon—but relishing the hiss of a moan that Keith offers him nonetheless.

“I was doing this when he said your name, Keith,” he breathes, his hot breath blowing over Keith’s sweat-dampened skin and raking a shiver up his spine. “Do you think he was imagining what it would feel like to have you inside of him?”

He can see Keith’s cock jerk at the thought, and a strangled moan tears through him. He strokes Keith’s prostate mercilessly, a sly grin tugging up his lips. Keith’s eyes are screwed closed now, his head tilted back as he continues to let out more noises—cursing wildly, begging for something, garbling a mixture of syllables that sound like Shiro’s name until everything is blurred together into one indecipherable groan.

This is a lot of change in such a short amount of time, Shiro realizes. The sounds that Keith keeps making, the look of him so desperate and so aroused that he can’t even speak. The idea that Shiro has done all of this on his own, without anyone here to guide his hand.

It’s almost too much to bear.

Without thinking too much, lest he talk himself out of it, he dips in, moving past Keith’s erection, opening his lips and digging his teeth hard into Keith’s smooth, milky thigh.

The sound that leaves Keith is nearly as loud as Lance’s moans in the hotel. It takes him a long, heart-pounding moment to realize that the heat that patters against his head and down the back of his neck is, in fact, Keith cumming far quicker than he’s ever cum before.

“I didn’t even—”

“Sh-shut up! I… I know, okay?! I—I know.”

Keith’s voice is heavy, his chest rising high as he drags in many long, labored breaths. He’s glowering up at the ceiling, tugging at his bound wrists as Shiro uses his free hand to pat at the cum in his hair. His fingers are still pumping in and out, until Keith wriggles uncomfortably in his grasp and tells him, with the most breathless frustration, to stop being an asshole.

He coughs a laugh, easing his fingers out and pulling himself up into a crouch again. His erection is relentless, stabbing out between both of them and begging eagerly for attention.

He watches Keith coming slowly down from his orgasm, wonders idly which thing might have set it off. Was it the dirty talk? Was it his fingers? The bite?

Could it have been all three?

He isn’t sure what he’s going to do just yet, as Keith’s breathing settles down and he cracks open an eye. He clicks his tongue as he takes in Shiro’s dirtied state, muttering under his breath about how he deserves it for doing the same thing to him a few days ago.

“I’d do it to that asshole cargo pilot too, if I could.” Keith hisses, his eyes narrowed, color rising again to his cheeks. “You both deserve it.”

Shiro watches him for a moment, going over his options in his head. He doesn’t think that Keith would be happy if he touched himself and left him bound. He knows that Keith likes to touch him more than he likes to watch—that he’s more enthusiastic about finishing him off after enjoying the show than allowing it to continue until the end. He knows that oral in this position might be awkward, and actually having sex with Keith would take a lot more preparation than either of them have time for right now.

Finally, just as Keith’s opening his mouth, surely to ask him what he’s waiting for, he grasps him by the hips, flipping him over roughly enough that Keith lets out another strangled cry.

He pulls Keith’s backside upward, propping his knees on the mattress so that his ass is jutting up into the air. He grabs the lube again, leaning forward and digging his teeth into one of his perfect, round cheeks—relishing Keith’s muffled moan as he pops open the cap and drizzles a generous amount of lube over his fingers. Keith has moved his face to the side, watching Shiro with his usual intense glare and making a small comment about being wasteful.

When Shiro immediately slides his hand between his cheeks, however, Keith doesn’t say much of anything. He buries his face back in the mattress, his fists tight in their binding above his head. He pushes his ass further into the air.

Shiro pulls his hand away after he lathers enough lube between Keith’s cheeks, wiping the excess on his erection before pressing his hips forward. He slides between them easily, a hand on each one, shoving them tighter together as he thrusts forward and back between them.

Keith’s ass isn’t full enough to cover him completely, but the skin against skin contact is enough to send spikes of pleasure striking through his nerves. He’s holding Keith so tightly that he wouldn’t be surprised to find fingerprint-shaped bruises on his skin later, but Keith doesn’t seem to mind. He’s letting out little noises against the mattress, trembling so desperately that Shiro thinks he might tumble off of the bed if he were to let him go.

It doesn’t take long of this slow thrusting before he picks up the pace, until he’s thrusting so hard that it’s rattling the bed against the wall—the rhythmic _‘bang, bang, bang’_ of the headboard and Keith’s scattered noises the only thing he can hear as the world fades around him and his orgasm ripples from his lower belly, spilling out over Keith’s back.

He slouches down against Keith, ignoring the feeling of his cum slick between them as he rides out the rest of his orgasm. Keith is breathing deeply too, cursing quietly into the sheets as he continues wriggling his fists in their bindings.

With a quiet, breathless apology, Shiro reaches up, tugging at the knot of clothing around Keith’s arms until he finally manages to free him. Really, he didn’t realize that it was so tight at the time, but when Keith pulls his hands away, there are obvious red circles where his shirt just was.

“Are you okay?” he asks, pushing himself off of Keith and sitting down to his side—suddenly acutely aware of the cum slicked against the front of his shirt and drying slowly in his hair.

He’d showered after messing around with Lance last night, but… maybe it’s time to bathe again. He wonders if Lance might be in the locker room now too.

“Of course I’m okay,” Keith grumbles, sliding himself off of the bed and waddling awkwardly over to his laundry basket. “Just… sticky. Thanks to _someone_ using too much lube.”

He shoots Shiro a glare over his shoulder for good measure, grabbing his towel, still damp from his shower, and wiping off his stomach before cleaning everywhere else. He grimaces, rolling his eyes as he works the towel delicately between his legs. After a moment of contemplation, he throws it back into the basket, fetching one of his old night shirts and tossing it to Shiro instead.

“I guess you can use this,” he says, narrowing his eyes, “Even though I had to sneak through the halls after you did that to me.”

Shiro offers him an apologetic smile, taking the shirt with a quiet thanks and wiping his head first. The clean-up has always been his least favorite part. He wishes that Keith would invest in some wet-wipes from commissary like he did, if only for these unfortunate times when neither of them can quite manage to keep the mess contained.

Keith begins to get dressed. Not one for loungewear, he opts instead to toss his stretched-out t-shirt into the laundry basket and grab an identical one from his closet, pulling it over his head before stepping into his boxers and pulling on his pants. They’re the dark ones that he bought in celebration shortly after enlisting—with the black, form fitting shirt and the red jacket that he wears even when it’s too hot around here for so many layers.

It had been hard convincing him that it was okay to let Shiro’s mom buy him something, but Shiro had seen the way that he’d looked longingly at that jacket, how his own pants were so tattered and stained that he’d be embarrassed going to the recruitment office in them to get his uniform.

With a soft smile, he pulls himself out of bed as well, throwing Keith’s dirtied night shirt into the laundry and beginning to fix his own clothes. The cum leaves a big, ugly wet mark where he hadn’t manage to clean it so much as spread it around. His hair is so unruly that he can feel it sitting strangely on his head. He hopes that he can make it to the locker room without drawing too much attention to himself, that none of the higher-ups will catch him on his way to cleaning the rest of this off.

He’s buttoning his last button when the door opens and Keith’s roommate pauses on his way back in.

Keith freezes as he pulls up his fly. Shiro’s zipper is still all the way down. The three of them exchange shocked looks for a split second, horror settling like a pound of ice cubes in the depths of Shiro’s belly. The look of absolute revulsion on Keith’s roommate’s face might be funny if he’d walked in on anything but this.

“We were just leaving,” Keith barks, grabbing Shiro by the arm and dragging him out into the hall. He barely has enough time to reach down and grab Keith’s before the door slams closed behind them.

He’s not stupid enough to think that the poor guy didn’t notice the gigantic wet spot on the front of his shirt, or the strange way that his hair is sticking up in all directions. And a certain, familiar smell is surely clinging to everything in the room. He isn’t sure how to go about mending this situation, but Keith doesn’t seem worried about it at all.  

He remembers the day after Keith moved in, the way that they’d sneaked off to Keith’s room immediately after his orientation speech and messed around while all of the other students were talking with instructors and getting to know each other. He still remembers the way that Keith had laughed later when he’d told him that his roommate had gotten a few complaints from their neighbors about loud noises in the room, as though two people were fighting and kept kicking the walls.

His horror back then was nothing compared to how he feels now, but it’s short lived, as Keith takes the boots from his hands and pulls them on.

“Go take a shower,” Keith tells him, pursing his lips as he reaches up and fiddles with Shiro’s hair. “Dry your shirt under the hand dryers or something. It looks awful.”

He’s out of uniform, but neither of them are willing to suggest going back in to grab it. The commanders tend to be more lenient after class hours and during weekends anyway, although it’s generally still looked down upon. For a moment, Shiro considers bringing Keith with him, until he remembers the whole reason why he went to see him in the first place.

“Oh, Keith,” he says, pausing only to lean down and plant a soft kiss on top of Keith’s freshly-dried hair. “Lance wanted to talk to you. He should be in his room.”

With a small nod, and a pat on his arm, Keith turns on his heel and begins walking in the other direction.

Shiro watches his receding back, reaching up to put his fingers where Keith had touched his head, thinking about those sweet noises that he’d made while he’d touched him.

Before realizing, too late, that Keith knew where to find Lance’s room without being told where it was, and wondering, with rising nerves, if he should be suspicious of that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this week’s chapter is the halfway point of this story! We’re all the way up the hill now, and it’s just smooth sailing back to the bottom. :)
> 
> I also wanted to announce that next Thursday is going to be US Thanksgiving (as many of you might already know haha) and I’m going to my fiance’s relatives’ house to celebrate, so I’m going to be posting next week’s chapter on Wednesday instead of Thursday. So, by all means, you can still read it on Thursday if you’d like! But it will also be available to you a day early if you want to get your sweet, sweet AIYO fix right as it’s hot off the press. 
> 
> Just consider it a turkey-day gift from me to you. Something to be truly thankful for. 
> 
> Anywho, thanks so much for reading!


	16. Romancing the Keith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Did you really want to talk, or am I wasting my time here?”  
> So it’s going to be like that today, Lance thinks. Keith’s just determined to get under his skin.

Hunk nearly burns himself shoving his hotplate under the bed when a knock pounds against their door—his eyes so comically wide with panic that Lance almost laughs, if not for the fact that they’re definitely in some deep shit if there’s a commander waiting for them on the other side.

He shoves the package under his pillow for good measure, smoothing out his shirt and pants and cleaning his throat. Hunk finally manages to tear the power cord from the wall and grabs the air freshener from its spot on their desk.

He sprays so much of it that Lance’s eyes water as he opens the door, a cough itching at the back of his throat. His heart pounds desperately, so many questions swirling around in his head. Can people smell their cooking from the hall? Did Shiro actually tell one of the higher-ups? Should he have known better than to have trusted him, despite all of the sneaky stuff that they’ve been up to behind closed doors?

And when he finally manages to meet the eyes of the person behind the door, he feels like an idiot—and an asshole—for ever doubting someone like Takashi Shirogane.

Because the person who offers him an awkward, lopsided smile is not Iverson or Dos Santos. It’s not one of the other students from Shiro’s rank.

It’s Keith, hands in his pockets, dressed more casually than Lance has ever seen him in his life.

Immediately, heat rises to his cheeks.

It’s not that Keith isn’t handsome even in his uniform, and it’s not like he’s never seen more of that smooth, milky skin than what his t-shirt offers, but something about seeing him out in the hall now—pink-cheeked and flustered, dressed down as though he’d rushed out of his room unprepared—and to what? To see Lance as soon as he got home? Did he really want to see him so badly that he couldn’t even put on his uniform…?

It causes butterflies to flutter about in his chest. It makes his blood run ten degrees hotter. It makes him feel even more so like his head it floating in the clouds, thinking of Keith caring so much that he was away that he’d rush over here like this to welcome him back.

He swallows hard. He wasn’t prepared for this. Of all of the scenarios running through his head about how and when he’d actually manage to give Keith his present, this wasn’t even on the radar.

“K-Keith,” he sputters—so awkward, so stupid, so far beyond suave that he almost slams the door in Keith’s face so he can try again later. “What… what brings you to my humble abode on this fine afternoon?”

Keith looks up at him, raising an eyebrow. He doesn’t respond immediately, but by the look on his face alone, Lance can tell that he’s not impressed.

Behind him, Lance hears Hunk’s disbelieving whisper of,  _ “Keith? It’s just Keith? Aw man, I ruined my crapes for nothing!” _

For an eternity, it seems, they simply stand there—Keith crossing his arms over his chest after the first few seconds, Lance leaning against the door frame in the most confident display that he knows. Keith taps his foot, raising his eyes to the ceiling. A few students pass them in the hall, peering at both of them as though there’s nothing totally normal about two dudes catching up on a regular Sunday afternoon.

Finally, in the snottiest tone in existence, Keith asks him, “So are you going to let me in, or…?”

Embarrassment immediately jumps up in his chest, spreading out hot over his throat and up to his ears. He moves out of the way wordlessly, allowing Keith to move past his outstretched arm as Hunk mutters something about  _ “striking out on the first pitch”  _ from his spot between their beds.

“Shiro said you needed to talk to me.” Keith tells him, once he closes the door. As though he truly has no regard for manners, he drops down on the bed without an invitation.

“You know… I uh, I actually have to go,” Hunk says suddenly, rising to his feet and wiping his hands on his uniform pants, offering Keith a shallow bow. “Nice meeting you, uh, heard a lot about you, Keith. I’ll be going now.”

He’s out before Lance can even ask what he could possibly have to do on a Sunday evening that can’t wait until morning. And it’s all for the best, really, because things only continue to get more uncomfortable the longer they sit here together in silence.

Keith’s eyes are trained on the hotplate, only half-obscured under Hunk’s bed. He seems as though he can’t quite decipher what it could be or why it’s in their room at all—as though the smell of burned crapes and the stench of too much air freshener hasn’t clued him in at all. For a moment, Lance wonders if he’s never seen a hot plate before, but he shakes his head.

Now is not the time to keep wondering about Keith’s stupid past.

Before he can find the right words inside of him, to explain all of this in a way that will successfully shut Keith up and woo him all at once, Keith steals that chance away.

“Did you really want to talk, or am I wasting my time here?”

So it’s going to be like that today, Lance thinks. Keith’s just determined to get under his skin.

He clears his throat, finally taking the first few steps from the door towards the bed. Keith doesn’t stop looking at the hotplate for a long time, until Lance is close enough that he could reach out and touch him if he really wanted to.

Which he doesn’t, really, unless it’s to grab him by that stupid low collar of his and drag him back out into the hall.

He throws himself down on the bed, hands balled in his lap as he looks everywhere but into Keith’s dumb, pretty eyes. Leave it to Keith to ruin his big moment without even realizing it. Leave it to himself not to know how to salvage this horrible situation without acting like an asshole himself.

“Shiro didn’t tell you why we went out together?” He asks, training his eyes on the cracks in the ceiling. He doesn’t want to see whatever insufferably handsome expression Keith is making right now, even as he twitches uncomfortably next to him.

Keith’s response is a moody grumble.

“Of course he didn’t.”

Then, more silence.

Lance wonders if Shiro would be better in this situation, if he’d know just the right way to cheer Keith up. And he wonders if Shiro could have bought him a better gift in the first place. If he could have found something so befitting that there wouldn’t have been a doubt in his mind that Keith would have loved it.

Because right now, he’s drowning in that doubt, telling himself that Keith is going to open that package and absolutely despise it. And maybe he’ll laugh—the bastard—at Lance’s pitiful attempt at being romantic! Maybe he’ll throw it down on the ground and grind it under those hideous boots of his, and he’ll tell Lance,  _ “This is why I don’t like you”  _ and he’ll leave laughing like the piece of shit that he is.

It’s a convincing enough argument in his head, but the Keith that’s squirming uncomfortably next to him doesn’t seem capable of pulling off such an evil, heartless show of rejection. If Lance didn’t know any better, he’d think that this Keith might be even more nervous right now than he is.

With a deep, calming breath, he pushes himself off of the mattress, pacing around Keith and fetching the package from underneath his pillow. His pulse pounds through his veins, heat burning under his skin and the whole world around him fuzzy and indecipherable as he thinks about handing it over to Keith.

How long has it been since anyone has given Keith a present like this? From the way that Shiro had reacted when he’d suggested it, it had seemed as though he’d given up trying a very long time ago. And why was that? Did Keith hate getting presents? Is he hard to shop for? Should Lance be expecting a punch to the gut for even thinking of doing something as stupid as buying him a gift to win his heart?

He swallows thickly, shoving the package toward Keith. It’s still in its brown paper bag. It’s still rattling around in the box inside, held in place only by a few pieces of scotch tape that the cashier had thoughtfully used to close the box.

He hadn’t had the nerve, or the time, to think of wrapping it in any other way. He hadn’t known if Keith would be more or less likely to accept something that was tied up with a pretty bow. He’d went into this totally blind. He’d really been stupid enough to convince himself that he could pull this off without Keith laughing in his face.

A long moment passes, and Keith still hasn’t taken the package out of his hand. When he finally spares him a look, Keith is staring at it as though he doesn’t understand what he’s supposed to do. His eyes are wide, his cheeks stained pink. He’s flicking his gaze from the package to Lance, rapid-fire, as though he’s waiting for an explanation to any of this that will make sense of things.

“Take it, Keith.” Lance’s voice cracks. He’s so mortified that he thinks he might die. “I—I bought it for you.”

Keith’s brows lower, his bottom lip jutting out as he takes the package with subtly trembling hands. He seems to think that this is a trick somehow, as though he’ll open the package and he’ll find some kind of joke inside. Like the snakes in the peanut jar, maybe, that Lance remembers seeing in so many cartoons. Or a pair of scissors with a note telling him to finally cut his ugly mullet, which Lance files away for future use.

He stares at it for a long time, turning it over in his hands, as Lance had many times, just hours before. The expression that he sends up to Lance is positively perplexed, and for a long moment, Lance has no idea what to make of any of this.

“Why?” he asks, creasing the edges of the paper in his fingers. “It’s… it’s not even my birthday.”

Lance lets out a flustered laugh, which is more of a cough than anything. He isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do right now—how he’s supposed to explain this to make any of it make sense. How he’s supposed to tell Keith that he’s fallen head-over-heels  in love with him, and he wants to make him feel as beautiful and stalked as his dad apparently made his mom feel so many years ago.

“Well…” is what he ends up saying, far less eloquently. “Because… I like you.”

They both flush darker at that, and Lance can’t help but thank Hunk for dipping out on this absolute train wreck of a moment. He isn’t sure how much worse this would have been with any sort of audience, no matter how small.

When Keith tears the paper, it’s the loudest sound he thinks he’s ever heard. It’s more deafening than the racket of his heart pounding in his ears, or the drag of his own labored breathing. He watches Keith’s nimble fingers working the edges of the paper open, tipping the bag so that the small package inside tumbles out into his open palm.

It’s innocuous in its plainness, which Lance can’t help but feel thankful for. He doesn’t know how much more difficult this would have been if he’d taken the cashier up on his offer to gift wrap it in that obnoxious red and pink heart-print paper that they’d had behind the counter.

The tape pops from the edges easily, but it takes Keith a few deep breaths before he actually opens the lid. Lance feels, in this moment, as though it’s the most intense thing he’s done in his entire life. Beyond the stress of taking his entrance exams, of piloting the simulator for the first time. He’s never felt so many nerves vibrating just beneath the surface of his skin before, and he doesn’t understand it—why a moment like this should feel like life or death. Why the idea of Keith hating such a stupid, simple present should feel like the worst thing that could ever happen to him.

The item inside of the box is nothing impressive, but Keith stares at it just as he’d stared at the hotplate under Hunk’s bed—like he might be able to grasp the concept of what it is, but not why it’s sitting right in front of him. He ghosts a finger over the inscription on the surface— _ ’You light my fire’ _ —Lance feels mortified about his choice to have that phrase, of all phrases, engraved on it when he’d been so confident about it before.

But it’s befitting, he thinks, for more reasons than one. Because Keith makes him feel more alive than he’s ever felt since he was young, and—

“It’s a lighter.” Keith says simply, looking up at him, dumbfounded.

Lance places his hands on his hips, feigning confidence as Keith tugs the lighter out of the box and inspects it. He convinces himself that Keith loves it more than he’s loved anything in his entire life, if only to mend the terrible way that this conversation started out, and how absolutely foolish he feels for getting so worked up over a present that only cost thirty dollars when Keith deserves so much more.

“You’re always smoking with those dinky throw-aways,” Lance boasts, puffing out his chest. “So now you can use this one. It’s wind-resistant, you know. Refillable, stainless steel. Totally awesome.”

Keith peers up at him, that same lost expression swimming around in his eyes and turning down his lips. He looks as though he wants to say something but doesn’t know how.

“It’s… cool.”

A wide grin stretches over Lance’s face. He’s swelled up immediately, like a balloon with too much hot air, feeling as though he might just float up to the ceiling.

“Of course it’s cool, I picked it out!” He all but cheers, shoving a finger into Keith’s chest. “And after all, baby… You really  _ do _ light my fire.”

Keith doesn’t appreciate his charming wink as much as every other girl that he’s ever used it on has. He shoves up from the bed, pushing Lance out of the way and scrambling toward the door. Before he yanks it open, with stiff, shaking shoulders, he barks out a few sentences that make very little sense at all.

“I—I’m— _ okay _ … You’re welcome—or, it’s okay. I just—I gotta go.”

And just like that, the door slams hard behind him, and he’s gone.

For a few ticks of the clock on the wall, nearly falling off of its hook from the force that Keith barreled out, Lance isn’t sure what to do. He sits in silence, running over everything in his head, wondering what in the world he did wrong and where everything took a turn from bad, to okay, to worse.

Keith seemed as though he liked it. He seemed as though he thought that it was cool—he didn’t even seem to mind the inscription, dammit, until Lance had to open his big mouth and ruin everything!

He’s feeling like a moron now, wondering why he can’t ever do anything right. Keith left the paper scattered about the floor, the box open with the protective fluff strewn about, like the sad corpse of this pathetic date rotting on the hardwood.

But then he thinks about Keith. He thinks that it would have been polite to at least thank him, even if he hated the present! Maybe he could have picked up his trash before leaving like that, before leaving Lance sitting here like an asshole, unable to understand at which point everything even went wrong!

He thinks about how Keith had ignored them after they’d messed around on the roof—how he’s always running away, always playing hard to get, always dangling just far enough above Lance’s fingers that he can’t ever hope to catch him.

And the anger that he finds within himself is enough to fuel him to stomp out of the room, to find Keith and demand that he say “thank you” like a normal person would. At the very least, he can tell Lance why he can’t stand sticking around, or why he’s so damn weird in situations where most people wouldn’t have an issue just turning him down.

He’s positively livid as he rounds the corner leading into the next hall—toward the string of rooms that he knows hold Keith’s, even if he isn’t sure which one, exactly, is his. There’s no one in the hall right now, close enough to dinner that most people have made their way down to the cafeteria.

But there’s Keith, standing alone in the middle of the hall. Before Lance can close in on him, he catches a look at his face, and that alone is enough to root him to the ground.

He’s clutching the lighter to his chest, that familiar, confusing frown, flattened out over his lips. There’s color still lingering on his cheeks, his eyes so soft, so much more vulnerable than Lance has ever seen them before. He’s looking at the words engraved on the surface of the lighter—Lance can see his eyes moving over them. His brows are low and knitted together.

And slowly, as though Lance is watching all of this in a dream, he smiles.

Lance doesn’t understand why the sight of Keith’s tiny grin is enough to send him running back to his own room. He doesn’t know why he slams the door behind him hard and fearfully, as though there’s a monster chasing him down the hall.

He doesn’t know why his heart bounces around in his chest, why he can’t seem to catch his breath for far, far too long. Why his thoughts race so quickly around him that he can’t focus on anything but how beautiful Keith had looked there, when he didn’t think that anyone else was watching.

But he understands that frown now, after so much time has passed him by.

He understands why Shiro thinks so fondly of Keith, when he’s always running away.

And he knows, without a doubt, that he’ll never be able to remove the mark of that stupid, mullet-headed bastard from the inside of his heart completely—not now, not after everything he’s seen.

Keith doesn’t present himself like any normal person that Lance has ever met before. He doesn’t let anyone know what sorts of thoughts are in his head, or the emotions buried deep down in his heart.

But he was definitely embarrassed back there, without a doubt.

And he definitely feels it too—between the both of them—the love and the undying affection that Lance can’t seem to stop feeling anymore.

In his own quiet way, Keith loved the lighter.

And Lance realizes, gradually, that he’s fallen in love with him too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, Moth here in spirit! In reality, I’m typing these notes on a Sunday night, and my [lovely beta](http://madamemauve.tumblr.com) is posting this for me, as we speak. So please send them some very good vibes, because I think I might die without them. 
> 
> Anyway, thanks so much for reading! See you next week!


	17. The Fire in his Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance finds Shiro, Hunk finds Keith.

When Lance finally manages to regain his bearings enough to think straight, he isn’t sure what compels him to go to the locker room.

Maybe it just feels befitting, to return to the source of everything after the bomb that just dropped on him, completely obliterating everything that he thought he knew about his life, about his relationship, about _Keith_. Maybe it just seemed like somewhere that Shiro would hang out unassumingly, since Lance still isn’t sure where his room might be located, somewhere off in the long, distant halls where the other senior officers reside.

But he’s desperate to see Shiro— _needs_ to see him more than anything else right now. For comfort, to make sense of any of this.

To ground him after seeing what he’s seen.

Because Keith Kogane _smiled_ because of him. He held his present close to his heart like he was going to cherish it forever. He was cute, goddammit! _Keith fucking Kogane_ had the gall to be cute after spending so much time constructing that horrible, snotty predisposition that so efficiently chased everyone else away.

Lance’s entire world suddenly feels out of orbit. He doesn’t know what’s real or fake anymore.

So he seeks out Shiro, for a hand to hold and a shoulder to cry on, for somewhere to bury his humiliation and this new-found, frustrating sense of admiration for someone as shitty as Keith. He tells himself that Shiro must have known about this whole _“Keith secretly being adorable”_ thing for a very long time. The bastard, he tells himself, must have been keeping that secret all to himself—biting his lip and purposefully withholding such valuable information until Lance had to go and find out for himself.

But he isn’t sure if he would have believed Shiro, had he not seen it for himself. And he knows, deep down, that no matter how many times Shiro could have told him that yes, secretly, even someone as thorny as Keith is capable of being so beautifully vulnerable at times, he would have brushed it off as simply Shiro being so hopelessly in love with an asshole that he couldn’t see him for who he truly was.

So he stumbles out into the hall on rubbery legs, runs a soothing hand through his hair and swallows down all of his residual nerves. If Shiro isn’t in the locker room, he’ll try the library. If he’s not in the library, Lance feels so determined at this point that he might hijack the loudspeaker in the Dean’s office and demand that Shiro meet him on the staircase by the roof so they can finally have some privacy to talk.

The early afternoon is gradually fading out into the oranges and pinks of evening, and as Lance shuffles through the puddles of light filtering into the halls from the glass ceilings overhead, he wonders if this is all that his life will really be to him anymore: the brief stretches of time between the dark blues of early morning when he rises for class and the comforting black blanket of night. He wonders, with a pang of something hollow and unfamiliar in his chest, if these memories of sneaking around with Keith and Shiro in the small window of respite between responsibility will be his proverbial grainy gray wedding photos placed proudly on the mantle. If maybe, some day far off in the distant future, Shiro’s gentle, loving smile and the small cracks in Keith’s stony exterior will be nothing but a fuzzy memory that he recounts to his own children over a cup of coffee, over a scratchy phone call from hundreds of miles away.

It’s a weird thought, and he doesn’t exactly like the way that it makes him feel—as though they’re running out of time somehow. As though the ending of this long, winding path that they’ve set out on will be tainted by something that he’s just too stupid to see yet.

He shakes his head, clearing his thoughts. He just needs to find Shiro.

That will make him feel better about all of this. Shiro will be able to make all of this make sense.

The locker room is dewy and humid when he pushes through the door. The familiar hustle and bustle that used to seem magical to him now feels like nothing short of an annoying obstacle in the way of finding Shiro. A few guys crane their necks to look in his direction, and a few of them—guys that he remembers regrettably from his more rambunctious episodes with his towel and their bare asses—roll their eyes and visibly pale when he slips inside.

_“Oh no, not this guy.”_

_“Don’t tell me he’s gonna break out the towel again!”_

He takes a moment, as he makes a mental note of all of the faces and naked bodies around them and notes with growing frustration that none of them match Shiro, why it took him so long to realize why being surrounded by hot, sweaty, nude men might have excited him more than it seemed to excite anyone else around him.

Why, after so many years, he didn’t even consider that it was more than possible to appreciate the beauty of all bodies, despite gender, and despite what kind of equipment they might be packing with the gym clothes come off.

Of course it had taken something big for him to finally realize, but how did Keith and Shiro know that? How did they realize this when he’d made his mind up, it was nearly impossible to sway him without some kind of big show or gesture?

He still hasn’t gotten to the bottom of everything—like how they knew when he had gym, whose idea it might have been in the first place to seduce him. There are so many questions still swimming around in his thoughts, muddying up his embarrassment and his desperation to find Shiro. He feels lightheaded now, overstimulated and strung out. He feels like a phantom possessing his own body, going through the motions of searching for Shiro as his thoughts whirl past him at startling speed.

He curses under his breath, squeezing through the small, confused crowds around him and making his way to the showers near the back of the room.

Memories flash behind his eyes—of that very first day that he stumbled in on Shiro and Keith, of Keith crouching down in front of him in the shower, of the two of them huddled between Shiro’s twitching knees on the roof, all lips and hot breath, needy and wanton with Shiro’s big fingers tugging helplessly at their hair.

He can feel an energy popping in here that he’s never felt before, and without thinking, he finds himself standing in front of that same shower that he’d slipped into with Keith days before, listening to the soft pattering of water as someone bathes inside.  

His nerves jitter through his veins, cold under his damp, heated skin. He thinks about what Shiro might be doing in the shower right now—how the water might be running in thick, slow trails down the stark lines of his perfectly toned muscles, how his fingers might be sneaking to all of the secret parts of his body that Lance got to touch last night. And he can feel his arousal swelling up inside of him, pounding in his throat, rushing a wave of vibrations over his skin.

He needs to talk to Shiro about Keith, but even more pressing, even more important than anything else, he needs to see those long, chiseled legs slick with water, the firm globes of his ass flexing as he bends over to pick up the soap from the slippery tile of the floor. He needs to see the way that Shiro’s honest, heartfelt smile might meld into the uninhibited, euphoric expression that he gets when he’s too filled with pleasure to care about who sees him come unfurled—like a tiger stepping out of its circus cage, like a giant that’s just learned how easily an entire town of humans could be crushed under its mighty feet.

He doesn’t dwell for too long on how weird this train of thought is. He doesn’t take a moment to ponder why Shiro continues to be nothing short of a God in his eyes when Keith only becomes more human.

Instead, he pulls the curtain back, an excited smile crawling out over his lips, until—

“Dude, what the fuck?!”

It’s not Shiro inside.

Lance slams the curtain closed before the guy who’s actually inside can react much further, telling himself hurriedly that Shiro must be in the next one instead. Surely, this one was just taken before he could get to it.

However, by the time he reaches the fourth shower, he isn’t so sure.

And he realizes, belatedly, that it isn’t so much the naked bodies in the locker room that get him going anymore, so much as it’s _two_ naked bodies in particular.

One of which, unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more likely, might not even be in here at all.

He’s just about to cut his losses and head for the library when the furthest curtain from the other end opens up just a crack—just enough that he can see the familiar, albeit perplexed, face of Shiro peeking out at him and waving a hand in the air as though to call him over.

After collecting himself and putting on his most confident grin, Lance puffs out his chest, doing a fairly good job at pretending that he isn’t dying inside as he makes the short walk toward Shiro’s shower stall.

“I thought—uh… I thought you always showered in the other one,” He says dumbly, a weak greeting as Shiro raises an eyebrow, “I need to talk to you… uh, about Keith.”

Shiro’s frown lifts up into a frustratingly knowing smile, before he nods in mock-seriousness and closes the curtain. Lance twitches as the water turns off and he can hear Shiro shuffling around in there, and when the curtain pulls back again, he nearly melts down into the tile.

Sure, he’d been fantasizing about this moment just minutes before—about how delicious and smooth and Earth-shattering Shiro might look slicked up with water, bearing all of the smooth, sharp angles of his perfectly chiseled abs to the world—but actually seeing him standing so proud and strong and naked in front of him, Lance nearly topples over as a sense of vertigo rushes through him.

He didn’t know that it was possible for all of his blood to flow to one place so quickly.

Shiro’s hand is firm and damp on his shoulder as he reaches out to steady him.

“Are you okay?” he asks, but Lance’s tongue is a dead fish in his mouth. His words slide right off of the slick, fat sides of it, fizzling out behind his teeth as he opens and closes his lips.

It takes a moment before Shiro seems comfortable enough to get dressed, as though somehow he has absolutely no clue that all of his glorious nakedness might be the cause of Lance’s issues. Lance takes in the shallow dip of his muscular back into perky, hard mounds of his ass—the tight muscles like stones beneath the golden skin of his legs, the tantalizing way that every part of him flexes as he bends over to grab his towel—like a well-oiled machine, like a mechanical bull that Lance wouldn’t mind pushing down against the tile and riding as long as he can hold on.

He isn’t quite coherent enough to wonder if having sex in a western-themed bed and breakfast might have warped his idea of sexiness even more than it already was. And frankly, he isn’t even sure if he cares.

He won’t be able to see cowboys or horseshoes for a long time without feeling a little weird about it, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s a small price to pay for finally scoring some time alone with his long-time love interest.

He shakes his head, lifting a trembling hand and combing it through his hair. This isn’t the time or place to start going off on such mental tangents. Some of the guys from the other showers are already starting to come out and whisper among themselves about the gross peeping tom harassing Shirogane, and Shiro himself is beginning to send him suspicious, worried looks over his shoulder as he pulls on his pants.

“Did you give him the gift?” Shiro asks finally, and Lance doesn’t miss the eagerness in his voice, as though he’s been holding himself back from asking this entire time, “Did he like it?”

The question reminds Lance of that drowning feeling from before—the whole reason why he’d come here in the first place. His lungs constrict, color pooling his cheeks as his arousal ebbs away in place of mortification, in place of a painful swell in his chest that he knows is all Keith’s fault for being so surprisingly, agonizingly adorable.

He’d never understood the urge to squeeze something cute until it popped. He didn’t get why his aunts used to pinch his cheeks and hug him too tightly as a kid. How his sister would squeal at puppies and kittens on the television growing up, sobbing to their mother that they were so cute that she would die, until their mom threw up her hands and adamantly refused to bring home a pet, time and time again.

Until now, he’d always told himself that it was a weird girl thing. That it wasn’t possible for a man to see something so precious that he might want to strangle the life out of it.

And maybe this is different, because he already wanted to strangle Keith, even before he was cute. But it’s close enough anyway, and the guys behind them are still whispering, and Shiro is still staring, seemingly growing only more concerned by the second.

“Y-yeah, I did,” he says vaguely, crossing his arms over his chest and tipping his head toward the floor, “And yeah… he did, I guess.”

From his position, he can’t see Shiro’s face clearly, but he can see the awkward jerk of his muscles as he pauses before buttoning his shirt. He sees the awkward way that he moves around then, as though he knows exactly what’s happened to even render someone like Lance practically speechless.

“Did he do the thing?” Shiro asks, and it’s the least eloquent phrasing that Lance has ever heard come out of his mouth. It would almost be funny, if he weren’t absolutely mortified even rehashing this. “You know, the _'running away'_ … thing?”

Lance nods hastily. He stares hard at the wet tiles on the floor. He can hear the other guys gradually filing out of the room, can feel the comforting warmth of Shiro’s eyes on his face, but he can’t allow himself to think about anything but Keith’s pink cheeks in the hallway, Keith’s small, embarrassed smile, Keith’s awkward tangle of words as he’d fumbled out of the room—as though Lance had finally found something that he wasn’t so good at, and he didn’t even know enough about accepting love to even talk his way out of it.

“He said ' _you’re welcome'_ when I gave it to him. Then he ran off.”

Shiro barks a laugh, and it’s as beautiful as it always is as it bounces around the room. It doesn’t tumble out awkwardly as Keith’s had weeks prior. It’s a long, resonate sound, a warm blanket, a deep, hearty song. Lance closes his eyes, tipping back his head and allowing himself to smile.

He wonders how much of this Shiro has also lived through. He wonders what he must have done in some mysterious past life to score so big in the here and now.

For a moment, he admits to himself that he doesn’t despise Keith—that he loves him all the way. That his feelings aren’t tangled up with a complicated mixture of hatred and bitterness and confusing sexual fantasies, and that the three of them are just normal students at a normal school, paving their way through the rocky beginnings of a new relationship without the unfortunate emotional blockades that Keith’s scattered along the way.

“It was cute, wasn’t it?” Shiro asks, his voice light and airy. Loving, Lance thinks. Weighed down only by his love for Keith, “I didn’t know why he ran off the first time that he kissed me, and I still didn’t understand it until the fifth or sixth time that he did it. I thought maybe he was just messing with me, but… Keith just gets overwhelmed sometimes.”

 _“Overwhelmed”_ is an understatement, Lance thinks, but he doesn’t mention it. He’s never seen Keith’s feathers get so ruffled, and he’d never imagined that it was even possible to see someone so cocky unwind so beautifully over something as mundane as a gift. He wonders what Keith would have done if it had been a ring instead, but that thought is so bizarre that he can’t allow himself to think about it for too long before his chest begins to feel impossibly tight.

Bizarre, at least, is the word that he chooses to describe it. He doesn’t want to think about what it actually makes him feel.

Shiro is toweling his hair dry, his usual carefree smile sitting comfortably on his lips as he finishes dressing and turns to place another gentle hand on Lance’s shoulder. The touch causes tiny sparks of warmth to ricochet along Lance’s skin, and he swallows hard, his head swimming with too many thoughts at once.

Like what sorts of things might make Shiro embarrassed, like going on another date. Like pushing him back into the shower and making such a mess of his uniform that he’d be stuck in here, spending time together for the rest of the night.

Shiro pulls away, slinging his towel over his shoulder and gathering the rest of his things.

“Do you want to come back to my room?” He asks, before fumbling as Lance’s eyes widen and his mouth drops open. “I-I mean, to put my stuff up. We—we can go somewhere else after, I—I just have to… put this back.”

And with a dumb nod, Lance agrees, telling himself that surely, Takashi Shirogane’s room can’t be anything special. Sure, it’s the room of a higher ranking officer. Yeah, it’s the room of the guy who he’s been crushing on since his very first day, but he can do this.

He can be suave and cool. He can be casual even as his heart is pounding rapidly in his chest.

He can be someone that Takashi Shirogane deserves. He can be as level-headed about this as someone like Keith.

After all, it’s just Shiro’s bedroom. Where he sleeps and wakes up in the morning, where he does all of those private things that no one else ever gets to see.

Really, what’s the worst that can happen?

 

* * *

 

The current topic spreading like wildfire through the Galaxy Garrison is news of the upcoming mission to Kerberos. As many things, the details have already been very safely swept under the rug—how they came to select the participants, who they might have selected, the parameters of the mission itself and the dangers of embarking such a long distance when none of their spacecrafts have managed to reach such a faraway place thus far.

There’s a campus news station on the television in the rec room, and through the glass walls, passersby can witness the small group of students slowly growing around the TV in astonishment, whispering amongst themselves about who might be the lucky pilots to take part in such a huge piece of history.

The popular choice is Keith Kogane: a fresh-faced newcomer with enough determination and talent to obliterate the scores of every pilot before him, even in such a short amount of time. Some students whisper of Takashi Shirogane, about his impressive reputation among his peers and commanding officers alike, about the talent that he possesses and the rank that he holds—about who else might be joining him so many miles away in the lonely recesses of space.

Hunk Garrett doesn’t think that any of this sounds particularly impressive—or at the very least, like it holds any semblance to something that he would consider “a good idea”. As a mechanic in an international space program, he imagines that his need to keep his feet firmly placed on the ground probably isn’t too commonplace, but he can’t imagine why anyone would ever need to spend four months straight trapped in the same tin can with three other people just to collect ice on a random planet at the edge of the solar system.

And he doesn’t like the sound of any of it, really. How it seems as though everyone has already made up their minds about who might be selected to embark. It’s going to be one of Lance’s new boyfriends, there’s no doubt about it, and deep down—beyond the growing anxiety and the fear sitting cold at the base of his belly—he wonders if Lance has even heard anything about this yet.

It won’t go over well when he does, Hunk is sure. Lance has always been what he would call… _dramatic_ , even on his best days.

His stomach growls, reminding him that Keith’s arrival interrupted dinner. He wonders, shoving his discomfort deep down into his chest, if they’re done with all of the pleasantries and whatever else might have come with Keith into that bedroom, so he can finally come back and salvage whatever’s left of his meal.

He’s heading back to his dorm room, readying himself for whatever unsavory thing he might walk in on, when he catches sight of the familiar ugly hairstyle that Lance can never stop talking about, peeking through the cracks in the crowd of their peers.

So Keith isn’t with Lance anymore, it seems. With a small gulp, he hopes that everything went okay. He isn’t sure how much more of this back-and-forth Lance can take—how much more _any_ of them can take, really. He’s quickly running out of comfort food as it it, and sooner than later, he’s going to have to break out the heavy artillery. Surely, Lance is one mental breakdown away from needing something a little more hearty, a little more _soul-reviving_ , and he isn’t entirely sure how he might manage to sneak in the coconut for fa’ausi if things get too hairy. He needs more notice than just a few hours to concoct a proper plan.

He draws nearer, reaching out a hand and opening his mouth to call out to Keith. He isn’t sure what he’ll say to him once he gets his attention, but maybe he can get a feel for what happened in their dorm. Maybe he can figure out how to properly diffuse the situation before he even gets a chance to see Lance’s downtrodden face.

But he watches as Keith’s eyes train to the television in the rec room, his eyes dark and hard as they scan the captions—the stern, proud faces of their superior officers, the student anchors barely containing their excitement as they describe the vague parameters of the Kerberos mission.

And something flashes lightning fast across his expression. It’s quicker than Hunk can take in, a splash of anger, something akin to hurt, something unnamable and sharp prickling through the shadows of his irises and stabbing straight through the hustle and bustle of the crowds around him. It’s engulfed immediately into the steel trap of his expression, and for the first time in a long time, Hunk realizes that he can’t read another person at all.

Keith storms away then, faster and stiffer than before, as though he’s carrying the weight of the entire world on those tiny, waifish shoulders of his. He’s a foreboding dark cloud clipping through the halls, the black phantom that Lance always accuses him of being. It’s startling, for a moment, to witness the searing waves of his anger gradually crawling through the halls, burned and branded into the steel and the glass around him.

The black dot of his hair disappears into a sea of oranges and tans, of smiling faces and elated whispers.

Hunk is left feeling like he only has one small piece of the puzzle, as though, he can ascertain with growing anxiety, that Keith himself must not be the pilot selected for the upcoming mission. But he’s mad about something, Hunk can tell. He’s ignited from the inside out with that uncontrollable rage.

It’s a small relief, Hunk thinks, that Keith himself isn’t going away so soon after Lance has just managed to start getting along with him, but that expression…

Hunk’s stomach turns. He doesn’t know if he should bring this up to Lance or not.

Whatever the outcome, he knows that it can’t be anything good, for any of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My level of commitment at this point is me, stopping on the way out of the house to go fill out wedding paperwork, and saying to my fiance, "Wait! I need to do something important before we go!"
> 
> And my fiance is currently in the acceptance stage of grief. 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you guys liked it! See you next week!


	18. The Shiro, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A small reprieve under a blanket of stars.

If Lance were being completely honest with himself, he would admit that a lot of his views of the world might have been shaped by the movies and television shows that he used to watch growing up.

It had taken him an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize that the girls’ bathroom at school wasn’t actually the chic Hollywood-esque powder room that the cartoons always made it out to be. It was years before he learned that it would be impossible to dig a hole all the way through the center of the Earth to China. He’d always been entirely too swept up in the stories being told in his favorite media to question some of the more bizarre logic used further the plots.

And he can’t say that he sees anything wrong with that, really, even to this day. A romantic outlook on life helps make things seem a lot more magical, he reasons. The fantasies residing in his brain will forever make the world around him seem like a much more vibrant and wonderful place.

However, in predicaments such as the one where he currently finds himself, maybe, just this once, he can admit that allowing his imagination to get the better of him might have just been setting him up for disappointment.

Because Shiro’s room isn’t low-lit and lined in velvet. There isn’t a crackling fireplace or a bed perpetually scattered with rose petals. There isn’t a tiger-skin rug splayed out languidly across the floor, there are no romantic tunes lulling softly through the cartoonishly large speaker of an old-timey record player somewhere in a shadowed corner of the room.

It’s just… a regular old room. It’s nearly identical to the one that he shares with Hunk, in fact, except maybe just a tad bit bigger. The only difference that really stands out to him is the presence of an extra desk on the other side of one of the beds, which is currently occupied by another higher ranking officer who doesn’t even look up from his book when both of them shuffle in.

Shiro greets the guy warmly, but Lance can barely bring himself to focus on the pleasantries that they exchange or the awkward, stilted way that Shiro explains to the guy who Lance is and why he’s followed him into their shared room.

He doesn’t pay much mind to the suspicious way that the guy eyes him up and down, or the way that he questions, his voice laced with a disgusting sarcasm that would regularly make Lance’s blood boil, “What, you collecting pretty-boy underclassmen or something?”

No, Lance is too caught up floundering in his inner turmoil to pay attention to anything but all of his hopes and dreams and elicit fantasies shattering right before his very eyes. Shiro spends hours every evening doing paperwork in the library for nothing but a personal desk. He sacrifices his days off and arrives early each semester to give welcoming speeches to new recruits for a twin bed instead of a single, and a closet so small and dingy that Lance would be surprised if he could fit even three uniforms inside of it.

He sneaks around and pretends that he isn’t dating the both of them for nothing short of an insulting amount of perks, and Lance wonders why he coveted any of this. He wonders if Keith knows how disappointing it will be once he successfully surpasses all of them and becomes the youngest superior officer that the Galaxy Garrison has ever seen—or if someone as idiotic and outlandish as Keith might find that the extra cubby and few added inches added to their rock-hard mattresses might actually be worth all of the boot-licking and strenuous practice that it’s taken him to get this far.

Shiro is having an uncomfortable conversation with his roommate as Lance devolves into deeper and deeper throes of inner-angst. He catches the clipped edges of it, the tense way that Shiro responds to prying questions that he didn’t quite catch, how the guy says something about another weird package sent from home that he’d put in his side of the closet, until the world finally comes to an abrupt, screeching halt.

“So did you break up with the mullet guy or is this one just some kind of side-thing?”

To Shiro’s credit, Lance imagines that this situation would have went over a lot worse with someone like Keith on the receiving end of such a snide accusation. He can’t say that he’s sure how he would react if Hunk had said such a thing either. He’s disillusioned gradually, by the snotty look on the other officer’s face, the way that he doesn’t even look up from his book as he talks to Shiro—like he isn’t the most ethereal being that he is, constantly demanding the attention of all eyes in the room. Or even just a miraculously talented pilot who deserves respect.

Lance gapes, so taken aback by everything that he’s witnessed in the span of less than five minutes, as Shiro dumps his things on his bed and grabs him gently by the arm. He’s tugging him out of the room just as Lance’s scattered thoughts are beginning to piece themselves together.

He never imagined that anyone could dislike a person like Shiro. He always thought, if he could just be more like Shiro, if he could just figure out how to be cooler, and more handsome, charming and more in-tune with the wants and needs of other people—maybe then he could stop feeling like such an outsider in every social situation. Maybe then he could finally feel like anyone really wanted him around.

It’s grounding, he thinks, and just as infuriating, to think of anyone talking to Shiro like that. They’re already three doors away from Shiro’s dorm before Lance even realizes that he should also be angry on his own behalf.

A “side-thing”?! Lance McClain is no one’s “side thing”! He can’t even believe the nerve of that guy! How did he possibly become a higher ranking officer with that kind of shitty attitude?! How does he possibly think that he deserves to bunk with someone like Shiro—so much as  _ breathe the same air as him _ —with such a disgusting, deplorable tongue in his stupid, ugly mouth?!

He’s trembling with rage as Shiro ushers him down the hall, his hand still firm and warm around Lance’s arm in a way that might have him riled up for completely different reasons if he weren’t so angry right now. Shiro’s hand wraps around the entirely of it easily, dwarfing him as though he isn’t a decently tall guy himself. He’s never felt so small around another person, so lost in another man’s shadow, so helpless and childish under another person’s kind, comforting gaze.

He realizes, belatedly, that he might be getting so upset only because Shiro is his hero. He’s his lover and his friend, but above all else, Lance feels that he’s someone to look up to, someone to aspire to be. And he feels now as though he’s watched another person trample all over that, as though, just by saying something rude to him, he’s broken the illusion that everything would be perfect if only Lance were more similar to someone like Takashi Shirogane.

It’s like that movie, Lance thinks, where the kids go into the closet and hang out with the lion and the guy with goat legs. It’s like that heartbreaking scene where they cut off the lion’s mane, and even still, he accepts the punishment of death with an astounding, unyielding honor and pride.

“Lance,” Shiro murmurs, his hand sliding up Lance’s arm to rest again on his shoulder, “It’s really not that big of a deal.”

Lance pauses, snapping out of his mental monologue to take in their surroundings. He’d been so caught up in his thoughts that he hadn’t even registered that Shiro had lead him past the library, beyond the locker room. He hadn’t noticed himself climbing the small stretch of stairs. He hadn’t even realized that Shiro had swiped his key card, or the heat that had instantly wrapped around them as they’d stepped from the stairwell out onto the roof in the dark.

_ ‘It must be getting close to curfew.’ _ is the first thing that he thinks.

The second is that Shiro even looks beautiful at night.

The third, unfortunately belated, thought is that somehow, Shiro was able to read his mind so perfectly that he’s even laughing at the way that he’d fumbled the plot of that stupid lion movie.

And finally, once the heat crawls up under his clothing and the chirping of insects hums above the sound of his rushing thoughts, he realizes that, in his rage, he must have forgotten the difference between thinking something and saying it out loud.

A habit, he knows, that he’s burdened himself with since he was a little kid.

Shiro’s laughter is short and quiet, a small vibration below the insects and the incessant buzzing of the machinery around the Garrison compound. His hand doesn’t move from Lance’s shoulder, and the smile on his lips is tighter, more reserved than Lance is used to seeing it.

He’s uncomfortable, Lance thinks, but he realizes, for the billionth time in his miserable, stupid life, that he’s really not that great at reading other people at all.

“I’m sorry,” he says suddenly, and the sound of his words startles even himself, “I ruined things with your roommate, didn’t I? Is he going to tell on you?”

Shiro’s smile is gone so quickly that Lance wonders if it was ever really there at all. He straightens his shoulders, tightens his fingers ever-so slightly around the fabric of Lance’s uniform. His gaze drifts out along the courtyard, tips up towards the endless blanket of stars in the wide, black sky.

His mouth is set in a straight line. For a moment, it seems as though he isn’t sure what to say. Or maybe, Lance thinks, that he’s realized finally what a mistake it was to invite such a moron to date himself and Keith.

God, he’s such an idiot. He should have just stayed in his room. He should have just called it quits when he was still ahead.

“He’s not going to tell anyone,” Shiro says softly, his voice barely even there at all, “We’re not going to be roommates for very much longer. It wouldn’t be worth it for him.”

And finally, he pulls his hand away. He takes the few short steps to the edge of the balcony, sitting slowly on the ledge and patting the spot next to him with another gentle smile. This one is stonier, Lance thinks. This one reminds him too much of Keith, if Keith ever smiled at all.

It’s guarded. Lance knows, even if he’s too afraid of ruining things further to ask, that he’s hiding something.

Eventually, once his legs decide to work again, he slinks forward and sits just far enough away from Shiro that he doesn’t feel as though he’s pushing things too far. He’s painfully aware of the electricity popping between them, this feeling that so many things are being left unsaid—things that neither he nor Shiro are willing to even begin talking about.

Instead, Shiro lets out another quiet laugh, before scooting just a little bit closer toward him, reaching out an arm to drape along his back.

His fingers rest just below Lance’s hip. He’s staring upward again, the reflection of the night sky glittering in the dark pools of his eyes. For a moment, Lance is reminded of skipping stones on the shallow black of the ocean’s shore late at night with his older brother. He’s reminded of that feeling of being miniscule in the presence of something absolutely breathtaking—of peering at his own reflection in that dark water and feeling as though he truly didn’t understand anything about the world around him.

Swallowing thickly, he flicks his gaze away from Shiro’s face, down to their boots sitting close together on the ground. He thinks about the ugly scuff marks on his knees, the stinging of the scratches on his palms each time that he washes his hands. He thinks about the warmth and the wetness of Keith’s tongue sliding over his lips. He thinks about the ache of his jaw as he’d swallowed Shiro’s erection as deep as it would go into the back of his throat.

Arousal swells hot in his belly, itching in his veins and warming under his skin. He clears his throat, lacing his fingers together in his lap and tipping back his head to gaze at the stars.

“Have you ever wondered how it might feel to float around up there?” Shiro asks, and he doesn’t give any indication as to  _ where _ , but Lance understands it anyway. “It’s kind of scary, when you really think about it, isn’t it?”

Lance has never pondered the actual “space travel” part of the program much, if he’s honest with himself. He always gets caught up thinking about things here on Earth—how proud his mother might be, how all of the boys who teased him in school might be seething when they see his name scrolling by on TV, when they hear about him on the evening news, and how everyone in his hometown won’t be able to stop talking about him. How he’ll be a legend as long as he lives, and for years after, he’s sure.

He always thought that, at the very least, he could be a proud piece of local history—Lance McClain: hero, ace fighter pilot, and the only kid who actually left this shitty town and moved on to bigger and much better things. The only person who he’s ever met who reached high enough to touch the stars.

He hates this part of himself now, for only a moment, as his eyes dip down from the vast expanse of the sky just in time to catch the tail-end of a mournful look that Shiro quickly covers up with another small smile.

“It might be scary, but that’s what makes it so exciting, right? It’s why we’re all here. We want to get out there someday.”

Something about the twitch of Shiro’s lips gives him the feeling that he’s said something wrong, but he can’t quite figure out what it is. Shiro’s fingers are brushing slow circles along his hip now. The sensation of it sends skitters of pleasure along his skin beneath his uniform, an aching fissure growing only wider and wider in his heart. He doesn’t like seeing Shiro vulnerable like this, and he doesn’t like the idea that Shiro’s sadness might make him uncomfortable at all.

Lovers are supposed to accept these things, aren’t they? How would Keith react to seeing Shiro staring, so forlorn, into the night sky? What could someone like Keith, who struggles to even say “thank you” after getting a nice gift, possibly have to say that could make all of this better somehow?

He’s not Keith, so he might never know. He’s not nearly as tactful, as watchful, as apparently caring and gentle as someone like Keith can be. He isn’t sure if he’ll ever be as good of a lover, or if that’s just another pipe dream that’s as good as rotted, like his aspirations to someday beat the asshole at the simulator and rise to the top once and for all.

Instead of continuing to fumble this situation with clumsy words, he reaches out a hand and places it on Shiro’s knee. It’s not a whole lot of contact, he knows, but his heart tremors within his chest. Sweat beads his hairline, from the heat and from his own nervousness. His hand trembles, and Shiro’s smile grows wider, sadder. His eyes are distant and they never leave the stars.

“Could you really leave it all behind though?” he asks. Lance gets the feeling that all of this matters somehow, that it’s the most important thing in the world. That he should listen closely now, lest he forget something important that he might never get the chance to hear again. Shiro’s power over him, this strange magic that has gripped his heart and refuses to let go, is startling. He never knew that he could feel so many things about another person.

“If you really think about boarding a ship and just taking off, leaving everyone you love behind… could you make yourself do it?”

There are already so many miles between Lance and his family. His mother’s voice crackles every day over the phone. He hasn’t been hugged in God-knows how long. He’s started forgetting what it feels like to be home—how his mother’s cooking smells, exactly which teeth his nieces and nephews are missing in their smiles, the sharp crack of his sister’s laugh when she hears something particularly hilarious, how it feels to be loved by someone without being afraid that he might ruin it.

When he takes the time to really consider it, he isn’t sure. It’s what he came for, isn’t it? It’s been his dream all along. He might make careless mistakes and he might wreck the simulator more times than he lands safely, if he ever lands safely at all, but there’s a certain feeling that comes with piloting a ship—even a fake one—that sends a surge of power and _ true purpose  _ straight into his bones.

When he’s piloting the simulator, he can understand why Keith always looks so at home behind the controls. He doesn’t understand where all of that talent comes from, where that feeling of belonging that he’s seen jittering about in Keith’s cocky grin might stem from, but in the simplest of terms, he understands the invigoration of it all.

And he imagines that piloting a real ship would feel just like that, only  _ more _ . He imagines that he would feel an immeasurable amount of bliss, of being truly free, if he could only climb high enough in the ranks to someday pilot a real ship, if he could someday shed these Earthly tethers and shoot out into the vast recesses of space.

He thinks about his family, and he thinks about the freedom beyond the stars. He isn’t sure which one might weigh more in his heart, or if he’d really need to choose between them at all. Most missions only last about a year, maybe two, at most. Most pilots aren’t away from their families for very long.

But it’s only been a few months, and he’s already aching with homesickness. He wouldn’t be able to call his mother in space. His only contact with the outside world would be through video calls with high-ranking officers, about the mundane day-to-day on the ship. His only view into life on Earth would be the rare transmissions of information that he might get, or an email that someone might send, asking him how it feels, day after day, week after week, as they’re doing nothing but waiting to finally reach their targeted planet.

His mother doesn’t have a computer back home. She doesn’t have an email address.

He breathes in deeply, anxiety suddenly constricting tight around his heart.

“I… I don’t know.”

It’s a startling realization. The world around him feels too big and too wide, too open. He feels exposed. He feels as though he’s the only moron around this place who has never thought about any of this.

Keith has, surely. He’s probably excited to get away from it all. He’s probably eager to leave the world that he so hates in his proverbial dust, and from the looks of him, he’s already so used to being lonely, and no one would be left behind to miss him anyway.

Except…

For Shiro, he supposes.

_ And himself. _

He chokes out a laugh, feeling suddenly awkward as Shiro’s eyes break away from the sky just long enough to send him a short, curious look. It seems as though he wasn’t expecting for Lance to be so honest—as though he still expects the same defensive bravado as every other time before this, after he’s went and exposed his insecurities and his fear.

Lance isn’t entirely sure where any of these feelings are coming from. He doesn’t know if this is something that Shiro has been shouldering for some time, or if the thought has just occurred to him as well. He doesn’t like to think about Shiro being too afraid to burden himself and Keith too much to confide in either of them.

He doesn’t like the idea of Shiro dealing with anything alone.

He isn’t sure how to feel about any of this, and so, like the coward that he is, he pretends that everything is okay.

There isn’t anything strange about the soft way that Shiro is speaking to him right now, the sad way that he’s staring up at the stars. There are no mysterious secrets wrapping their thorny edges around their relationship, there’s nothing that could keep any of them apart.

He pulls his hand from Shiro’s leg, scratching nervously at the back of his neck. His eyes are drawn back up to the sky, even as he can feel the warmth of Shiro watching him spreading out over his skin.

It’s hot tonight, just as it is every other night.

For so many of their classmates, tonight is a night just like any other. A mundane flick of numbers passing on their bedside alarm clocks, a random Sunday night before a bright and early start tomorrow morning.

Time, he knows, has been passing slowly around them. The days that had seemed to fly by since he stepped foot onto the Garrison campus are suddenly lurching to a gradual, sluggish stop.

This moment, he feels, is lasting an eternity; this moment in which Shiro is reaching out for him, begging him silently for comfort, and he’s too stupid to know what to say.

“It’s—it’s a good thing that we have a lot of time to figure things out though, right?” He asks meekly, his voice barely loud enough even in his own ears. “I mean, Keith and I probably won’t be able to go on any missions for a few more years, and you’re—I mean, it’s not like you’re going anywhere anytime soon either.”

He can feel something shift in the air around them. He doesn’t dare look in Shiro’s direction.

Everything is going to be fine.

It’s going to be okay.

There’s a long pause, in which Lance forces himself to stop jittering nervously, in which Shiro draws in a deep, staggered breath. He can still feel Shiro’s fingers pressing gently into his hip, can still feel the prickles of warmth vibrating over his skin beneath them, can still hear the hum of the complex and the chirping of the insects in the oppressive, thick heat of the night.

“Of… of course.” Shiro clears his throat. Lance ignores the spike of suspicion that rises in his heart. He ignores the way that his skin crawls at the awful, stilted way that Shiro speaks. He pretends that something awful isn’t going on right under his nose, pretends that he’s not a complete and utter moron and surely the worst boyfriend on the planet.

“It’s just scary to think about, I guess,” Shiro tells him, “Of course it’s what I’ve always dreamed of, since I was a kid, but… Everything is different once you realize how close we are to really  _ living _ it. I think sometimes it might be more terrifying than it is invigorating.”

His resounding laughter is clipped and ingenuine. He’s a very bad liar, but Lance chooses to believe him anyway.

“I’m sorry, I brought you up here to talk about Keith, not this.”

Lance means to tell him, _ “It’s okay, you can talk to me about anything and I’d love every word that could possibly leave your mouth.” _

He means to say,  _ “I want to be here for you, even when things get hard.” _

He means to say, _ “Fuck Keith, he can wait. He’s not important right now.” _

But the heat of the night begins to itch where his uniform meets his dewy skin. His nerves are strung out and shot—far too many thoughts spinning around in his head for him to find a singular statement that might remedy this situation somehow, that might redeem him as a boyfriend before Shiro tucks these vulnerabilities away forever.

And he’s still thinking about that sweet little smile drawing out over Keith’s lips as he’d held that lighter close to his heart, how tenderly he’d touched it, how rare it must have been for him to receive anything from anyone that he didn’t even know how to react in the face of a simple present.

And so, instead of anything particularly romantic or tactful, instead of wooing Shiro right off of his feet like he’d always told himself that he could if he ever got him alone, he says, “It’s okay. I want to fuck Keith.”

On one hand, this seems to cheer Shiro up, after a moment.

For a few seconds, his eyes widen and his jaw goes slack. He stares at Lance as though he never could have imagined that particular string of words leaving his mouth at any point in time, and especially not now.

But that moment passes quickly, and Lance isn’t sure if that’s a good thing or not. He’s not sure if the Shiro who he shocked silly with his stupidity is better or worse than the Shiro who is currently laughing so hard that he lets out a loud snort before covering his face and apologizing profusely—no matter how adorable it might be.

On the other hand, however, he’s absolutely positive at this point that any ideas that he’d had about his ability to woo a guy like Shiro were completely moot. His tongue doesn’t listen to his brain even on the best of days, and he always somehow manages to fuck things up somewhere between formulating the romantic lines in his head and actually unleashing them on unsuspecting romantic interests.

He claps a hand over his mouth immediately, a small shriek of horror vibrating against his palm as he feels his cheeks growing impossibly hot.

His mortified excuses are muffled through his fingers, and no matter what he says, he knows that there’s really no mending this catastrophe now that he’s messed up this badly.

“I—I didn’t mean that! I meant—I meant “ _ fuck Keith _ ”, not “ _ fuck _ Keith”, okay?! I-I don’t want to fuck him—I, I mean, I—That’s not—”

Shiro is trying his best to reassure him through dying laughter.

“It’s okay,” he says, his voice raw and cracked and breathless, “It’s okay, Lance, I understand. I do too.”

The final warning bell signaling the beginning of curfew begins to blare inside of the building. Dark clouds move about in the sky, concealing the subtle light of the stars, hopefully just enough that Shiro can’t make out the color that’s surely staining Lance’s cheeks.

The moon is round and bright above them, the insects continue to sing.

And Lance wishes that he could meld down into the cracks of the concrete.      

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I actually have important notes for once! At least, by my own lax standards of what “important notes” are, haha!
> 
> Anyway, I’m getting married next week, and I think I may have mentioned before that I might have to just wait to post the next chapter until the 21st. However, my always wonderful and always reliable beta agreed to post the chapters for me, so thankfully, both of my WIPs are going to be updated as usual, on schedule. Even if I might not be around until the weekend. 
> 
> I hope you guys have a great next week!


	19. Home is a Place Where the Heart Lives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Through luck, coincidence, and just a little bit of fate, Shiro and Keith fell in love at first sight with the same person.

Lance bites down on his lip so hard that it sends a sharp prickle of pain all the way to the corners of his mouth. He places a trembling hand over his face, groping the other against the wall behind him as his knees knock and his skin buzzes with heat.

There’s a clattering outside of the door, but before he can focus on the tiny blossom of fear and self-awareness that flutters up in his chest, Shiro does something with his tongue that has pleasure bleeding out over any coherent thought in his head.

He lets out a long, shuddering moan, digging his fingernails sharp into his cheek. He tells himself that the wet noises between his legs aren’t turning him on, that he isn’t already so close to cumming from only the thought of someone walking in on them like this. He tells himself that he’s not making such a ruckus in here that anyone outside might notice (and that he actually  _ doesn’t _ want for that to happen)—even as his foot slides forward against the tile of the floor and bumps against a mop bucket, sending it crashing against the opposite wall.

He can hear Shiro’s laughter blowing out through his nose.

He can feel the vibrations of it humming against his cock.

The world is a stuffy supply closet just down the hall from his first period classroom. It’s Shiro’s hands resting warm and soft against his bare thighs. It’s the small stab of light penetrating the corners of the door, illuminating just enough of Shiro crouched down before him that his mind’s eye can piece together the rest of the picture just fine.

The world is nothing but the hustle and bustle of students passing through the hall outside—it’s the blaring alarm that signifies the beginning of second period, the sugary sweet smell of maple syrup from this morning’s breakfast still hanging heavily in the air.

It’s Shiro’s eyes flicking up to meet his own—black pebbles in the dark.

Okay, back up, rewind.

His brain skitters to a sudden halt.

How exactly did he end up here again?

With a jolt, he finds himself sitting up, sweaty and dirtied, wrapped up in his sheets. The clock on his bedside signifies that it’s 0200 hours, as Hunk snores across the room and crickets chirp outside of their window. He can make out the blurry edges of the moon through their bedroom window through the curtains, reminding him again of the way that Shiro’s eyes had reflected the stars just hours ago.

He’s still trembling, still struggling to piece together the scattered parts of his dream. He was walking to class, excited to see Keith. He’d forgotten his textbooks and apparently also his pants. Standard nightmare, he supposes, so when did it take such a sudden turn?

And why is he even surprised by any of this anymore?

He curses quietly, air pushed through his teeth. He cranes his neck to get a better look at Hunk’s face, making sure that he’s still asleep.

And he pulls himself out of bed with a click of his tongue, tip-toeing across the room to clean himself off and grab another pair of pajama pants.

It’s only two in the morning, but he can already tell that it’s going to be a long day.

 

* * *

 

 

Bright and early Monday morning, the upcoming Kerberos mission is all that anyone can talk about.

Shiro wishes that he could return to his dorm and go back to bed.

As it is, between his morning class and lunch, the Garrison is giving tours to potential new recruits. He isn’t entirely sure what sorts of people are willing to drive a good fifty miles from the nearest city to visit a military school with such ridiculously high standards that most of these kids won’t ever stand a chance of seeing more of this place than the mundane places that they’ll visit during the tour, but he chalks this rather pessimistic line of thinking up to his own sleepy grumpiness and agrees to lead a small group without argument.

Matt sends him a rather suspicious grin as Commander Ryu gives instructions, passing out a pocket-sized list of every place that they should lead their students and when and where to stop for lunch. Shiro thinks that he might be able to sense his bad mood somehow, and for a moment, he straightens his shoulders just a little bit higher, screwing up his face in a vain attempt at appearing less grouchy.

He slept okay last night, sure. He’s been kept awake a lot lately, unable to fall asleep as anxiety and preemptive homesickness rattled around in the back of his brain. But he’d slipped into unconsciousness easily last night, as though Lance’s adorable confession and his pathetic excuses that followed were just the sleep aid that Shiro had needed all along.

Of course, it had only taken a kiss to placate Lance, and maybe that had stroked his ego just enough that he couldn’t manage to focus on his fears for very long.

But his easy slumber had went sour as the night dragged on, and he’d awoken just after two in the morning, riddled with nerves, shaking terribly as a cold sweat beaded at his hairline.

For the first time in years, he’d dreamed about those terrible black bars surrounding the orphanage wrapping around him like dozens of ink-black snakes, refusing to let him go. He’d dreamed about the gray sludge of snow sliding through his fingers as he’d struggled to grasp at the ground, of the rude jeers of those awful bullies echoing in the bleak, overcast sky.

Keith had been standing just a few feet away, watching him with a blank, iron-clad expression. He’d been waifish and pale, filthy and unkempt. Shiro can still remember his own reflection staring back at him in Keith’s wide, dark eyes. He can still remember the missing teeth behind Keith’s lips when he’d opened his mouth to speak, the bruises and mud-caked scratches that no one ever cared to clean properly.

He’d reached feebly for Keith’s hand, his mouth agape in a silent scream. He’d felt miniscule then, pathetic and terribly weak. He’d realized, in that moment, that he was useless, and he’d  _ always _ been useless, without Keith reliably close by to carry him along.

_ “You can’t save me, Takashi.” _ he’d muttered, and those bars had dragged Shiro closer and closer to the mouth of the orphanage—those terrible, gnashing icicle teeth hanging low over the chipped paint of the double-doors, the hinges creaking and groaning as they’d flapped open and closed. _ “You’re just going to abandon me, like everyone else. Why did you think that you could save me when you’re only going to leave me behind again?” _

_ I can’t keep chasing you _ , he’d added. _ I can’t keep fighting to keep you around. _

Shiro shakes his head, but Keith’s words continue to swirl around in his brain. He listens to them like water circling a drain—over and over on an endless repeat until he can imagine how the real Keith might say them perfectly.

Ryu is telling them to meet their groups at the entrance. Matt claps Shiro on the back as he passes, jostling him out of his thoughts.

“Chill out man,” he says, laughter in his voice, “They’re just tours. It’s not like you haven’t done a million of these by now.”

Shiro knows that he still has a few more months left until the Kerberos mission. It’s only mid-November. They won’t take off until Spring. And Keith knows already, and he was okay.

Is it really so hard to expect for Lance to react in just the same way?

It would be, he tells himself, if he weren’t being such a coward and keeping that little piece of information to himself.

He’ll find out eventually, one way or another. And he obviously suspects that something’s going on. Shiro hadn’t missed the way that Lance had looked at him last night, as though the questions had been on the tip of his tongue, but he’d just been too afraid to ask.

_ ‘I would have told you if you’d asked,’  _ he thinks to himself, following the rest of the tour guides out of the room into the hall.  _ ‘But I’m a wimp, just like Keith always used to say. I can’t do anything on my own, without someone brave holding my hand.’ _

He can hear the other students muttering in the halls, can feel their eyes trained on him as he passes, their fingers pointing at him when they think that he won’t see.

And he knows that they mean nothing by it, of course. He knows the thought that’s on everyone’s minds:

_ ‘If anyone will be chosen to pilot the ship to Kerberos, it has to be Takashi Shirogane.’ _

He hates that they aren’t wrong, and he hates himself even more for hating it. He just can’t bring himself to feel excited anymore, not since the day after his commanding officers called him into the office and told him that he’d been selected for the job.

They’d asked him, in a room low-lit and devoid of any decorations on the wall—like some kind of cruel mock-up of an interrogation room, designed to make him feel even more on edge than he regularly would as all of his superiors started stoically at him from across a wide, glossy desk— _ ”Is there any reason why you shouldn’t be considered for this position?” _

And he’d fumbled for a moment, like an idiot. He’d bitten his tongue, color rushing to his cheeks as he’d almost told them,  _ “I don’t want to leave my boyfriend behind.” _

What had he expected, really? Did he think that Keith would graduate without incident, that they’d shoot off into space together and live out the next few months in marital bliss? Did he think that they’d discover some kind of advanced alien society in the stony ridges of Kerberos, that they’d find a nice little intergalactic dive where they could drink milkshakes and watch the asteroids skipping by through the dark gaps between the stars?

Did he really think that anything could ever play out the way that it did in the movies—with himself, and Keith and Lance, all huddled together in some tiny tin-can of a ship, bickering and making love, collecting samples from an uncharted planet and comforted in their shared loneliness and homesickness by the two people who they loved the most in the universe?

He’d told them, after a moment, _ “Of course not, sirs.” _

He’d wondered then, what they might have said if he’d bared his soul and told them instead,  _ “Well, I’ve been sleeping with a lower ranking officer since before he enlisted, and soon enough, I plan to start sleeping with another one as well.” _

He’d wondered how quickly he would be expelled, his name shamed and blackballed forever, kicked to the curb with barely enough time to pack and call his mother to beg for the money to take a plane home.

He’d wondered then what he could have possibly said to make them consider choosing someone else.

And he’d wondered, guiltily, if he was really so weak-willed that the idea of leaving Keith and Lance behind was all that it took for him to throw away all of this hopes and childhood dreams.

His mom had been thrilled when he’d called her and told her the news. Ryou had told him, with a crackly voice filled with so much pride that his chest had ached and his eyes had prickled with tears,  _ “I knew you’d do something amazing someday, little bro.” _

Keith had been happy for him, in his own way. He’d given him a folder filled with clippings from the magazines in the rec room—the ones that they both knew very well weren’t supposed to be messed with—about the lives of astronauts in space, about the different freeze-dried foods that they used to eat in the seventies, compared to what they eat now, how often a pilot might want to exercise in order to retain the majority of his muscle mass once he returned home. It had meant a lot to him, of course, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Keith just wasn’t telling him how much this whole thing bothered him.

He couldn’t help but wonder if Keith secretly hated him for going away again.

Matt had been ecstatic that he’d be able to spend the next year or so with a good friend. And Commander Holt was a kind man, someone deserving of respect—a truly brilliant person who had survived countless space voyages, the type of person who was brave in a way that Shiro knew that he could never be.

He left behind his wife and young daughter every time that he went away, and still, he carried a deep love for the job in his heart, everywhere that he went. As though maybe things would be okay. As though maybe Shiro was just overthinking things, and getting himself worked up over nothing after all.

Commander Holt had stopped him in the hall after he’d filled out the beginning of many waivers and contacts that would take up his free-time in the following months. He’d rested a comforting palm on his shoulder, seemingly unaware of the awkward way that he had to bend his arm in order to reach high enough.

“My daughter, Katie, was born while I away,” he’d said simply, the corners of his eyes wrinkling as he’d smiled, “But she still called me  _ “papa”  _ when I came back. Matt was five when I went on my first mission, but he told everyone in his class that his dad was meeting aliens when they asked him why I never came to his baseball games.”

Something within Shiro’s chest had stirred, he’d felt a gentle warmth vibrating over his skin. Commander Holt’s hand slipped away from his shoulder, that soft smile never leaving his lips. He left his hand hanging in the air for a short moment, flicking his wrist in a small farewell wave as he turned to make his way down the hall.

“If that  _ friend _ of yours really cares about you, he’ll still love you even while you’re gone. We carry those who love us everywhere, even out in space.”

In that moment, it had felt as though everything had shifted and clicked into place. Questions that he hadn’t even begun to ask were already answered, in as little as two sentences. As few as twenty-eight words. 

For a long time, Commander Holt’s tender advice was enough to reassure him in times of doubt. For awhile, he could sleep soundly only after he repeated them in his head.

But eventually, he began to wonder why Commander Holt knew enough about him and Keith to say such things, why he’d used the word “love” when talking about a supposedly platonic relationship, and why, suddenly, Matt was sending him these knowing glances across the lunch table and between classes as though he’d been let in on a particularly juicy piece of gossip.

Keith was right, of course, when he’d told him that Matt probably knew about them already.

Obviously, the Holts were a family to be feared and respected. Where most commanders and fellow students failed noticed the subtle nuances of their relationship, surely, Matt and Sam had known from the very beginning. Shiro must have been too eager in his recommendation for Keith to enlist, entirely too thrilled when he’d passed his entrance exams with flying colors.

He must have boasted just a little too proudly when Keith had aced the flight simulation, when most of his peers had expected for him to be insulted that a newcomer had beaten all of his hard-earned scores.

They haven’t been particular subtle, sure, but he’d like to think that anyone who wasn’t paying close enough attention might still be left in the dark.

After chewing on this piece of information for many months, he still isn’t sure how it makes him feel.

Mortified, naturally, but it’s obvious now that neither of them are planning to out him. He’ll gladly accept a few knowing looks in exchange for their discretion.

But there’s still the issue of telling Lance, which is a steep mountain of complications all stacked together. He feels selfish for inviting someone into their relationship when he’d known that he had so little time left here on Earth, as though he was Keith’s doting parent, finding the perfect babysitter. As though all of this could be okay somehow if Keith had someone to hold him and keep him warm when he got lonely.

He feels as though, if he doesn’t go about this carefully, Lance might think that they were using him, that they’d been checking off some sort of disgusting bucket list and “seducing an innocent bystander” was the final box. He worries that Lance will accuse him of using him as some sort of substitute, that he might think, in the very worst scenario, that once Shiro returns from Kerberos, maybe they won’t have a use for him anymore.

And he knows that it’s not like that. He knows that he’d been a fool in love from the moment that he’d peered across the auditorium and spotted that handsome newcomer gawking at him as though he’d never seen another man before. He knows that he’d harbored this crush in secrecy, worried about what Keith might think of him, for weeks until Keith had finally forced him to spit it out.

His heart had fluttered when Keith had first mentioned Lance, when he’d described him so perfectly that Shiro had no doubt that the same guy who wouldn’t stop making weirdly sexual threats and childish jabs at him each time that he got a good grade was the same boy who’d looked up at him as though he were nothing short of a work of art.

He recognizes those sorts of looks by now, of course. He’s never considered himself to be a particular attractive person, but he knows how it feels to be on the receiving end of another person’s lust. He still treasures the few memories of Keith’s jealous scowls when girls would send him flirtatious smiles—how Keith had fumed incessantly when a well-meaning cadet had asked him out on a date in town.

_ “This guy in my class—Lars or something, I don’t know—he keeps sticking his tongue out at me like he’s two years old.” _

Initially, he’d been concerned when Keith had told him. He’d already started hearing the rumors about Keith getting into fights, and while he trusted Keith to control himself and knew perfectly well that he appreciated his home here enough that he wouldn’t ruin it over a petty disagreement, he’d worried that with too much goading, Keith might not be able to resist the temptation.

But the days had continued on, and eventually, this Lars character became an inside joke between them. Keith would pretend to be frustrated when he recounted their interactions each afternoon as they studied together, but Shiro didn’t miss the tiny curl of his lips, the amusement lighting up the shadows of his eyes. And he knew that not just anyone could hold Keith’s attention in such a way, and that more people than Lars were determined to mess things up for him and dampen his achievements with their meanness.

He knew that there was something about this “Lars” that intrigued Keith, something that captivated him just enough that he was willing talk to Shiro about it.

_ “He told me today that he wanted to, ah, what was it—uh, ‘Bend me over and expose me as a fraud.’” _

Keith had laughed as he’d said it—actually  _ laughed _ —his fingers playing nervously at the edges of his workbook, his face bathed in the gold of evening sun. His eyes had sparkled in the dying light that poured through the library windows as they whispered back and forth.

_ “Who writes this guy’s material? It’s like he doesn’t even realize how gross that sounds.” _

And Keith had told him, two weeks after orientation, when the memories of that cadet in the auditorium were still so fresh in his thoughts that he was starting to become concerned, that Lars was actually kind of cute.

_ “If he keeps his mouth shut, I mean… I guess he’s the kind of guy who girls would like. He’s nothing like you, but I—I mean, I guess he’s okay.” _

The serendipity of the universe tied them together like this—allowed them to fall for the same person, even as they’d both been too worried to tell the other, in fear of how he might react.

His heart had thundered wildly in his chest when Keith pointed Lance out in the hall one day, nearly a month after they’d started talking about him.

Lance had been flirting with a group of girls then, a wide grin stretched out over pearly teeth, a thin brow waggling as he’d leaned in to say something to one of the girls that she’d immediately turned her nose up at. He was all spindly limbs and impossibly smooth skin. He was all boyish good looks and electrifying charisma.

He’d moved about with such ease in his stiff and snug uniform that Shiro had found himself wondering how he might look without it.

And Keith was right, as always.

Lance was  _ very _ attractive, just like Shiro remembered.

He’s not sure how long it had actually taken for Keith to learn Lance’s name, but Shiro himself had heard it from another officer in his rank. He’d been helping the guy organize some paperwork, chatting idly about the new students and the simulation checklists that the poor guy had been stuck logging into the computer all evening.

_ “You’re friends with that Kogane kid, right?” _ he’d asked, eyes trained on the papers in his hands as Shiro had paused, anxiety skittering in his chest,  _ “These simulation scores can’t possibly be right. It says here that he beat the highest record.” _

Shiro’s pride had been short-lived, however, because moments later, the guy had added,  _ “A lot of these are pretty bad though. Ariana Malgeri: C-, Edwin McAllen: D+, Lance McClain: D-, Jiya Dhawan: C+... It’s kind of depressing, isn’t it? You work your ass off to get into a prestigious school and you fail the biggest test in the whole course immediately. You’d think they’d let these guys train a little bit longer before they threw them to the wolves.” _

For whatever reason—be it his own firsthand knowledge of how bad Keith has always been about remembering names, or the fact that he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Lance’s smiling face in the halls for  _ days _ at that point—he immediately connected the dots when the other officer said _ “Lance McClain” _ . And maybe it was only because Keith had told him earlier that day that Lance had failed his simulation test miserably, that it had been so rough looking at his downtrodden face and listening to Commander Iverson lecture him as he’d pulled himself out of the shuttle that even Keith had felt bad for him.

Maybe it was because Lance had never seemed like much of a _ Lars _ when Shiro caught glimpses of him in the halls. Or maybe fate was just smiling at him that day, and he shouldn’t have overthought it, because Lance McClain was a cute name, he supposed, and it suited someone like Lance better than anything that Keith might have conjured up in his head or Shiro could have labeled him as.

And three days later, as Keith lit a cigarette on the roof and Shiro made slow work of matching the buttons on his uniform jacket and pulling up the collar to mask a fresh set of bite marks, Keith had spoken to him in a voice so small and fearful that he almost hadn’t even recognized it as Keith’s.

_ “I think I like that cargo pilot,” _ Keith had told him, eyes trained on the long sliver of sun disappearing over the horizon, his mouth a stiff line, his shoulders tight, _ “I think I like him how I like you.” _

He’d almost said that he was sorry, almost turned to Shiro with that heartbreaking, lost expression that he only ever seemed to get when he thought that he’d let Shiro down somehow—but Shiro had stopped him before he could open his mouth to speak, with a hand in the air and the most reassuring smile that he could muster with such a freshly sore jaw.

_ “It’s okay.” _

He’d found himself laughing, just a little, so overwhelmed by how in-tune they were with each other, how somehow their hearts had become so alike that they’d even yearned for the same person, without the need of words. He’d found himself wanting to share this feeling with Lance as well, to share Keith with him, to share everything with him that he possibly had to offer. He found himself wondering, in the small pause of afternoon melding into night, if a relationship could really work out between three very different people.

_ “I like him too.” _

And he isn’t sure, even now, exactly when he started falling harder. He isn’t sure if it was that first day or any of the days that followed.

He’d felt like a schoolgirl with a crush, like a hopeless loser who didn’t even know the sound of his beloved’s voice aside from the boisterous laughter that he sometimes heard in the halls, or the small clips of conversation that he could pick up as he passed by.

Lance was always silent when he noticed him, always gaping in that very same way as before, always standing on the threshold of saying the words that Shiro could see very clearly sitting on the tip of his tongue, before tucking his tail and shirking off in his nervousness before he could ever manage to meet his eyes.

It hadn’t been Keith’s idea to ambush him in the shower, no matter how much he would like for Lance to continue thinking so.

No, he’s ashamed to admit it, mortified that he could ever stoop so low as to expose another person to something so  _ indecent _ , but—

_ “You’re right,”  _ Keith had told him, a devious grin tugging up his lips, _ “He’s not going to come around on his own, so we might as well shake things up. I heard he gets pretty rowdy in the locker room anyway.” _

The entryway of the Garrison is crowded with chattering new faces, already broken off into their tour groups by the numbers scrawled on their name tags. After a moment of confusion, in which Shiro realizes that he should have been looking through the small packet of papers that Commander Ryu gave him instead of allowing his mind to wander, he finds the number of his group written in messy permanent marker on the cover of his roster.

_ Group number three _ . They’re further back, towards the doors. Two girls, four guys, all nervously jittering about and marveling at the high, glass ceilings and the random students wandering through the halls, straggling behind as the final bell signalling the beginning of second period begins to ring.

He remembers, briefly, the wonderment that had filled Lance’s tired expression at the back of the auditorium the very first day that he caught sight of him. He remembers how, if he hadn’t known better, it would have seemed as though Keith had been bored by all of it.

And he shakes his head, stepping forward and introducing himself to his tour group with a hand on the back of his neck. He bows shallowly, catching Commander Ryu’s eye across the hall as he does so—and he knows that it’s improper for a high-ranking officer such as himself to bow, but his mother’s voice in the back of his thoughts won’t ever let him get away with impoliteness.

Silently, he hopes that Ryu will understand.

Or perhaps, he’ll turn this little indiscretion into Iverson as a good example of why he shouldn’t be trusted to pilot the ship to Kerberos.

It’s an ugly thought that he instantly regrets.

He tries to shove those feelings as deep down into his heart as he can possibly manage.

Matt is doing his best impression of a stern, “no nonsense” sort of senior officer as Shiro leads his group by. He’s telling a tall, gangling boy to straighten his shoulders and show respect, corrects a short, red haired girl’s salute. And he does so with the most mischievous of glint in his eyes, as though he’s in on some kind of joke that none of them could possibly hope to understand.

Shiro knows that he’s always eager to freak out a few newcomers when he still has the chance to fool them into thinking that he’s anything short of a devious jokester himself. As though he didn’t spend the better half of his first semester here struggling to figure out what the commanders meant when they told him that he wasn’t standing at attention properly.

“Don’t be too hard on them, Officer Holt.” Shiro tells him, feigning the type of gruff professionalism that he knows Matt will thank him for later. “You remember what happened last time. Last I heard, that poor cadet still hasn’t left the hospital.”

Matt catches on immediately. He straightens his posture, his boots squeaking against the floor as he turns to face Shiro fully. His poor tour group looks absolutely terrified—wide-eyed and pallid as they watch the two of them in horror.

“No one can prove that I was involved with that, Officer Shirogane,” Matt barks, his voice cracking as he forces his tone a few octaves too low, “I warned him not to stick his hands in the propellers. How was I supposed to know that he wouldn’t listen? That’s why you gotta listen to me, got it?”

He turns back to his group at this. Collectively, they jump, nodding and throwing up trembling salutes.

Shiro claps Matt on the back, shaking his head and leading his group away. He can hear Matt letting out a loud laugh just as they’re making their way down the hall towards their first destination: the cafeteria.

One of the girls in his group asks a lot of questions. He has a good feeling about her from the start. She’s a tiny thing with long, shiny hair pulled tight against her scalp. She wears bright pink lipstick, which stands stark against her dark skin, and large, cat-eye glasses that sit low on the bridge of her nose. She tells him that she’s always been interested in engineering. He tells her that a friend of a friend is a brilliant engineer, boasts about the quality of the program until her smile stretches excitedly from one ear to the other.

A tall, broad-chested boy asks about self-defense classes. He says that he wanted to attend a school with a weight room. Shiro checks off the roster for each member of the group, asking them about their interests, struggling to stop comparing them to Keith and Lance—to remind himself that not every person who has a bright passion burning inside of them has to be Keith, that not every show-off needs to be Lance.

He feels a little guilty, because he has high hopes for each and every one of these potential students. He knows that they could be great if they applied themselves in just the right way.

And he knows that they deserve more than an air-headed, lovesick idiot leading them blindly around the compound, holding his breath each time that a bell sounds and hoping that he might catch a glimpse of one of his boyfriends out in the halls.

He’s leading his group through the long hallway of pilot’s classrooms, his last stop before they’re scheduled to meet back in the auditorium for lunch. The bell overhead rings, signalling the end of another class, and he pauses as he explains the parameters of the flight simulation until he can hear his voice again.

Classroom doors open, students file out into the hall. He tells his group that a certain newcomer just beat all of the highest simulation scores, that he ramped the number so high that it would take an extraordinary amount of talent to ever usurp him.

“The Galaxy Garrison has been training pilots for decades,” he tells them, “but you should never tell yourself that you can’t still make an impact. We’re improving every day, and students such as that cadet are continuing to surpass our expectations. If you choose to pursue an education at the Garrison, you’ll be contributing greatly to our future in space travel, and making your own mark on human history—”

Surprise spikes through him as he’s jerked forcefully backwards by the crook of his elbow, pinpricks of pain buzzing over his skin as blunted nails dig into his sleeve.

He’s swiveled around roughly, and for a moment, he’s so perplexed by the amount of strength that it might take for someone to overpower him so easily that he can’t do anything but gape, his words teetering off awkwardly as his tour group mutters in confusion behind him.

He shouldn’t be surprised to see Keith’s dark eyes staring up at him—his hair damp and disheveled, the collar of his uniform stained with water, as though he’d dressed himself so hurriedly that he hadn’t taken the time to dry himself properly.

His brows are knitted and low, his mouth a firm line.

Shiro makes a weak attempt to introduce him to the group, to play this off as though Keith isn’t overstepping a ton of professional boundaries and potentially getting both of them in very deep trouble.

The other girl, the one who didn’t ask so many questions, asks him if everything is okay. The students moving around them in the hall slow down and stop, whispering about what Kogane might be thinking, grabbing a senior officer and whirling him around, interrupting official Garrison business with such a dangerous look in his eyes.

“This—uh, this is Keith Kogane,” Shiro says meekly, “He’s the pilot that I was just telling you about, the one who—”

“Stop.”

Keith releases him just as roughly as he’d grabbed him, crossing his arms over his chest. He lets out a short, hard breath, hissing a curse and flicking his gaze to the floor.

Shiro swallows nervously. He makes to reach out, to place a comforting hand on Keith’s shoulder, but his fingers freeze before he makes contact. He’s painfully aware of the countless eyes watching them, the potential new recruits, their peers who might misunderstand.

When Keith looks back up at him, there’s a desperate look to him—an unspoken plea for help, a silent warning of what’s to come that reverberates deep within Shiro’s chest before he even has to explain himself.

“Lance knows.” Keith tells him—his voice low, gravelly. His eyes are hard, his expression nearly unreadable. Shiro is filled with a sense of foreboding. He knows what Keith is about to tell him next. He knows that he’s officially ruined everything, that there’s really no fixing this now that he’d waited too long and allowed this stupid secret to go way too far.

He chokes out something that might be a question, but his blood is pumping so loudly in his ears that he can barely hear a thing. His tongue is an over-sized, clumsy thing, sitting uselessly behind his teeth. His heart beats so quickly in his chest that he wonders if everyone around him can hear it.

Keith’s eyes are wide and worried. When Shiro takes a moment to look closer at his face, the halls around him far too colorful and disorienting to ever hope to focus on, he notices a curious pink swelling on his left cheek, just under his eye.

The world is a quiet, slow-moving thing. It’s dizzying and bright, and he’s numb and dumb and useless as Keith continues to speak.

But he hears the end of it, even if he wishes that he hadn’t. He hears the one sentence that he was hoping against all hope that he could avoid if he could only stop being such a coward.

“Shiro,” Keith tells him, “Lance knows about Kerberos.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Greetings from the past! Sunday night, to be exact, as I’m sitting here formatting this chapter and writing out my notes so my lovely beta can post this for me on Thursday. I’ll be home Thursday night, but I’ll be packing and planning, and probably going to bed very, very early so I can get up for a very early wedding service.
> 
> And it’s a bit magical in a way, I think—this very lovey-dovey chapter about Shiro and Keith falling in love with Lance coming out… when I’ll very surely be in a very lovey-dovey mood myself, haha!
> 
> Anyway, another HUGE thank you to Sierrah! And a huge thanks to all of you for the well-wishes and the nice comments last week! I’ll be back Sunday night, and I have a bit of a festive surprise next week!
> 
> Until then, thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it!


	20. Perro que ladra no muerde

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance uncovers an awful secret.

Lance presses his fingertips against his temples, rubbing in slow circles as the tension works away from his brows. There’s a headache pulsing at the base of his neck, a strange, thrumming of anxiety in the depths of his chest, but he tells himself that it’s nothing but tiredness.

He hadn’t had an easy time falling back asleep last night. For whatever reason, he couldn’t get the memories of Shiro out of his mind—that faraway look in his eyes, the small downturn of his lips, the soft way that he’d spoken as though he’d been too afraid of the emotions slowly brewing in his heart.

With his elbows against his desk, Lance does his best support his head against his hands and at least _pretend_ that he’s paying attention to the lesson. His gaze travels gradually to the back of Keith’s head, near the front of the classroom. And he tells himself that he shouldn’t be feeling too intimidated to talk to him after everything that happened yesterday.

After that little fiasco a few weeks ago, everyone seems to suspect that something weird is going on between the two of them. Every time that he shuffles in his seat, if he reaches down to grab a pen from his bag or flips a page in his workbook just a little too loud, he can feel the eyes of everyone on him—just waiting to witness whichever outlandish thing he might be planning to do next.

He grits his teeth, glowering at the back of Keith’s stupid head, hoping that every single strand of that horrible mullet falls out one day, all at once. He hopes that he gets what he deserves, that he truly suffers in all of the ways that Lance has suffered. That someday, he understands that once he peels away that beautiful face, the talent, the overwhelming determination, and the all-around charm of his idiotic “bad boy” routine, the Keith that lies underneath is nothing but an ignorant jackass who’s still long overdue for a good ass-kicking.

He isn’t even really sure why he keeps telling himself these things. He knows that he doesn’t even believe them anymore.

But it’s an easy way to distract himself from all of the _other_ things that he’s feeling right now. Like the overbearing urge to kick back his desk and lunge across the room in Keith’s direction. To pin him down and kiss him so many times that Keith’s dumb, pretty head spins. To tell him how cute he was yesterday, to give him so many presents for the rest of his life that the moron stops acting so surprised.

Keith doesn’t budge. He doesn’t crane his neck to meet Lance’s eyes. He doesn’t scratch the nape of his neck where that hideous mullet springs out from his scalp, as though he can somehow feel the omens flying around in Lance’s thoughts. If he can feel Lance’s eyes boring holes in the back of his head, he definitely doesn’t act like it.

Like the insufferable ass-kisser that he is, he simply continues taking notes, raising his hand to ask questions at the right intervals, only stopping to turn the page of his notebook when he’s filled the pages with too many perfect fucking notes.

Lance tells himself that he doesn’t envy Keith as much as he hates him. He tells himself that he doesn’t want to be anything like Keith, that he doesn’t even _like_ Keith—and just because he’s madly in love with the guy, he doesn’t have to think that the sun shines out of that beautiful ass of his or anything.

The lesson drags on miserably, his only short reprieve the fleeting moments in which Keith fetches something out of his bag and _almost_ looks in his direction. And Lance realizes, with much frustration, much deep-rooted, all-consuming rage, that Keith is playing this stupid game with him on purpose.

Like sliding with Shiro into the locker room showers, like sticking out his tongue to play with the end of his pencil—he’s waiting for Lance to lash out at him, to let out all of that pent up frustration.

He’s setting a silent trap and waiting patiently until Lance steps right into it.

And Lance wonders, through the lust clouding his thoughts and the annoyance at the fact that Keith obviously has him wrapped around his finger, if purposefully avoiding these carefully-placed traps and not playing right into Keith’s slutty little hand is really that much better than just giving in and slipping off into a supply closet after class to let off steam.

He’s still considering the pros and cons of this as the bell rings, signalling the end of class.

Keith is out the door in seconds flat, but Lance doesn’t miss the short look that he sends his way—the shitty grin, the fanning of those ridiculously long eyelashes. He grinds his teeth, barely stopping himself from flipping the bastard the bird for fear of their instructor seeing him.

But he’ll see Keith again—if not in class later on, then after school’s out and he’s headed back to his room for the night. He knows the general area of Keith’s room now. He knows that he spends his evenings in the library with Shiro.

He formulates a counter-strike as he wanders out into the hall, ignoring all of the excited gossip around him, so wrapped up in his personal fantasies of making Keith squirm that he completely misses each mention of a newly announced mission.

He makes his way to his second class of the day, deaf to the chatter, to the names dropped, to the big news.

He won’t be paying enough attention until later on.

For now, he’s enthralled with all of his plans, his perverted mental pictures, the endless ideas of endless hiding spots around the building, where he can make Keith moan without worrying about anyone hearing him.

 _‘I’ve got your number, Shit-head Kogane,’_ he thinks to himself, a wide, cheshire grin tugging up his lips, _‘And I’m coming for your ass later on.’_

 

* * *

 

Hunk is acting strangely.

To be fair, he’s usually strange in some shape or form, of course, but there’s something about how extra _twitchy_ he’s been since Lance accepted his sleepless fate and rolled out of bed right as his alarm went off this morning—how he keeps skirting around every mention that Lance might offhandedly make about Keith or Shiro, or how he boisterously brings up his plans for tonight’s dinner each time that Lance notices the odd, excited energy that seems to be popping in the halls—and Lance decides that either the tuna that he’d nicked from the cafeteria yesterday was long past the expiration date, or he’s hiding something.

He’s getting pretty sick of being surrounded by so many secrets. He’s tired of feeling like some stupid little kid who no one thinks is mature enough to handle the truth.

And it’s not Hunk’s fault, he knows this, and he’ll feel just a little bit guilty when he thinks back to this moment later on.

But they’re chatting between classes, and Hunk jumps nervously as some girl walking past them laughs loudly with her group of friends. He speaks especially enthusiastically then, as though he’s trying his hardest to make the most noise possible, and finally, Lance snaps.

“What’s your _problem_ , Hunk?” he barks, his annoyance coiling, ugly and hot, within his chest. “If you have something to say, could you please either say it or stop acting like such a freaking weirdo?!”

Hunk is practically trembling now. There’s a look on his face so sour that it almost seems as though he’s eaten the world’s moldiest lemon.

His eyes are wide and fearful, which only makes Lance angrier. It makes him feel as though everyone just expects for him to freak out, and he understands, much later, that he definitely isn’t giving Hunk any reason _not_ to expect that from him. In the moment, however, he’s barely capable of stopping himself from raving about it—from telling Hunk that Shiro keeping secrets is one thing, that those horrible, private looks that Keith sent his way are another, but his _best friend_ too?

No, he can’t keep putting up with this. He can’t accept this, not from Hunk. Not from everyone else.

After a moment, Hunk composes himself somewhat, but there’s a reluctance in the way that his shoulders sag, how his brows draw low, how he bites gently at his bottom lip as though he’s still not sure if he should let Lance in on whatever’s bothering him or not.

“Dude, I… Have you really not heard about it yet? I—I don’t know if it’s my place to tell you.”

Which translates, in Lance’s anger-clouded mind, to, _‘I don’t want to be the one who has to deal with how you’re going to react.’_

“Hunk, I swear, if you don’t spill right now, I’m going to find Iverson and tell him all about the rig that you’re keeping in our room—”

“ _Okay_! Okay, Lance, I… I’ll tell you, just—just don’t go talking crazy like that, okay? You know you’d never do that to me, I mean, you wouldn’t… would you?! You wouldn’t betray my trust like that, dude, I know you wouldn’t!”

Lance sighs heavily, raising his brow expectantly and crossing his arms over his chest. He taps his foot in a dramatic show of his impatience, making it loud and clear that if Hunk doesn’t fess up within the next five seconds, he might just make good on that threat.

Hunk waves his hands in front of him in surrender, apologizing hurriedly and reaching forward to grab him by the arm. He leads him away from the dwindling crowds in the hall, so wrapped up in his nervous muttering that he doesn’t even make a note of the bell that rings overhead. Lance knows that Hunk is about as punctual as they come—that he’s worse than even Keith about getting to class on time—and he wonders if whatever he’s about to hear is really such a big deal that he’s willing to accept a tardy for it.

Gradually, as his anger ebbs away, it’s replaced with a gnawing worry. He’s reminded, momentarily, of the feeling of standing in the locker room after Keith ran away, of feeling like the lowest scum in the ocean, as though he had no words to describe the aching dread that had hollowed out the inside of his heart.

He hadn’t understood anything back then either. He feels, in this moment, as though he’s simply drifting through life—never understanding more than he needs to in order to survive, helplessly hurdling over one big, confusing meltdown to the next and never learning anything important from any of it.

Hunk pulls him into an empty classroom. The automatic lights flicker on just as he closes the door.

“So… have you talked to Shiro about, uh… I mean, it’s not really confirmed or anything yet, but I saw Keith in the hall the other day so I guess he knows, so maybe you guys already talked about it and I’m overreacting, but I really thought this would be the kind of thing that you’d bring up to me, you know… since you’ve been so open about everything else so far and this is kind of a big deal, but uh, I thought, maybe, if he hadn’t brought it up to you yet, maybe I shouldn’t tell you because it’s better to hear it from him, but maybe it’s better to hear it from me than some random person in the hall, so—”

“ _Hunk_ !” Lance raises his voice just enough that Hunk jumps again. He shrugs off Hunk’s hand, that’s still sitting uncomfortably on his arm, his annoyance flaring up tenfold as he listens to the helpless way that Hunk seems to be avoiding the subject. “Just say it! They didn’t tell me anything, so just _spit it out_!”

For the first time that Lance has ever witnessed since they met, Hunk curses. It’s quiet and barely there—just a hiss of air through his teeth as he raises both hands and scrubs them over his face—but it’s enough to double the size of the anxiety expanding inside of him.

It’s enough to make him realize that maybe, it might not be fair to expect Hunk to shoulder this responsibility alone, no matter how frustrating it might feel to constantly be left out of the loop.

“Hunk, I—”

“No, man… you’re right, I’m sorry… It’s just, uh… They announced the other day that they’re sending a crew all the way out to Kerberos in the Spring, and… the word around school is that Shiro’s gonna be the pilot.”

The moisture pooling in Hunk’s eyes is truly heartbreaking. Lance has never seen another person look more like a kicked puppy in his life.

The words sink in slowly. At first, he thinks to himself, _‘Is that all that it is? What’s the big deal?’_

But then he thinks about Shiro’s solemn expression last night. He thinks about the way that Keith sometimes looks at Shiro, as though he’s a temporary thing, as though his shelf-life is incredibly short, as though he’s holding on as long as he can, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do when all of this ends.

He thinks about all of the little clues that he should have picked up on, how stupid he is for allowing this secret to go on between them for so long—how they should have told him from the start, before they got him so mixed up in this big mess. Before Shiro going away became less of a sad realization that he’d no longer get to stare longingly at his crush in the halls, and more of a monumental, life-changing experience.

And he asks himself, as his knees threaten to buckle and the classroom around him tilts and shudders, as though the world itself is falling apart, _‘Why didn’t they trust me enough to tell me? Why didn’t they care enough to let me know?’_

_‘Why was I so stupid that I couldn’t even realize that Shiro was trying to tell me this last night?’_

“Lance, dude, are you okay? Do you need to lie down? Do you want me to call the nurse?”

Hunk’s voice is muted and distorted. Lance feels as though he’s listening to the tardy bell, to Hunk’s worried questions, to the lecture across the hall and the hum of the air conditioner from the other side of a window—as though he’s plunged himself into the depths of the frigid ocean, and the world exists just above the surface.

Shiro had tried to reach out to him last night. He’d tried to share his fears and his worries, tried to clear the air and confess that he’d been keeping this to himself, but Lance had been too stupid and self-absorbed to realize it.

Shiro had tried to tell him, but Keith…

Keith didn’t care at all.

Keith was more than happy to allow him to keep living a lie.

And maybe it wouldn’t have been fair to have talked about it behind Shiro’s back, but even now, Lance doesn’t have it in him to hold a grudge against someone like Shiro. Shiro has always been gentle. He’s always been kind.

But Keith is the hurricane that spares no man in his path. Keith is the strong one. Keith is the one who should have realized that it was too hard for Shiro to talk about it, and he should have told Lance. He should have realized that Lance deserved to know.

It’s not a fair assessment, but Lance won’t realize this until much, much later. He’ll think back eventually, and he’ll remember it with regret, but right now, he can’t think of a more viable candidate for his hatred than the cocky, mullet-headed piece of shit who’s been making his life a living Hell from day one.

He can barely feel Hunk’s hands on his shoulders, barely comprehends the fact that he’s being shaken and that Hunk is practically yelling his name at this point. He ignores the hysteric way that Hunk calls out to him, ignores the bile writhing in his belly, ignores everything that isn’t the white hot anger boiling in his veins, or the tight clench of his fists, or the realization that if anyone has to own up to this, it’s Keith Kogane.

That bastard thinks that he can tip-toe the tightrope just out of everyone’s reach forever. He thinks that he’s so good that he can just keep fucking everything up and get away with it. He doesn’t think that Lance is capable of calling him out, that if he ever managed to, surely, he could do some slutty horseshit or bat those pretty eyelashes of his and get out of it.

He thinks that Lance is an idiot, that’s he’s beneath him, even now.

And he doesn’t linger on the idea that he might be using anger to cope with his sadness and the worry that still hasn’t quite gone away. He doesn’t allow himself to think about the possibility that he’s only blaming all of this on Keith because he’s the easiest target.

He doesn’t dwell on the idea that he still hasn’t quite accepted that Keith actually has feelings, that his stony facade is enough for Lance to pretend that anything that he says won’t hurt him.

That he can get away with hating Keith for this, even though, deep down, he realizes that this is just as much Keith’s fault as it is Shiro’s, or Hunk’s, or even his own.

Instead of facing any of this, he pushes away from Hunk, and he isn’t as quiet as Hunk as he curses. He flings the door open so loudly that it bangs violently against the wall. He doesn’t even spare the class across the hall a glance, even as the professor jumps and all eyes turn in his direction.

He doesn’t know what time it is, and he doesn’t really care.

All of this started in the locker room, and Keith culminated this horrible, doomed relationship in the locker room. It seems to him that their entire relationship revolves around that place by now, that he’ll never be able to think about either of them without remembering the feeling of wet tile slipping under the pads of his feet or the musky smell of body wash, the damp fog that perpetually hangs low in the air.

And he knows where he’ll find Keith, without thinking about the time, without even doing the math in his head to remember what time he’d caught him running around in gym last time that they messed around in there.

He’s always liked to think, in a situation that called for fight or flight, he’d be the kind of guy who would stick around. He’s always told himself that he would stick to his guns until the very end.

But he’s never considered what he would do if another person broke his heart—how he would react upon hearing upsetting news, how he would feel if something terrible happened and he didn’t want to blame the real person at fault.

He won’t be proud of himself for this later.

For now, he throws himself in the direction of the locker room, and he isn’t sure what he’ll do when he gets there.

But he knows, finally, Keith has to pay for something.

If he’s ever going to feel better about any of this, Keith Kogane has to pay.

 

* * *

 

According to the gossip around the Galaxy Garrison for the next three weeks, until the next big thing rolls around and this juicy piece of information is nothing but an unproven legend that no one can ever seem to get their facts straight about:

Lance McClain—that weird, borderline perverted cargo pilot who routinely weaponizes towels and peeks in on guys in the shower—burst into the locker room just as the previous gym class was finishing their showers. He was howling at the top of his lungs as he kicked in the door, so hard that it nearly ripped from the hinges, some will say.

Others will say that he tore it clean off of the wall and carried it over his head.

Collectively, the inhabitants of the locker room had shielded their naked bodies. It wasn’t a proven fact, sure, but it seemed as though McClain was a bit of a peeping tom. It seemed, to his fellow male students, as though he got a special kind of _thrill_ out of seeing his peers in the nude, and no one was quite willing to fuel whatever depraved kink he might have had going on.

The rumors vary wildly from this point on.

One guy will say that Lance simply turned heel and fled. That the whole “tearing the door from its hinges” ordeal was some kind of bizarre power play to garner respect. Another will say that he slipped on the tile and cracked open his head.

But for others, the story carries on.

And for very few others, it carries on with the truth.

As it is, Lance burst into the locker room just on schedule, by some magnificent fate of the universe.

The door stayed firmly on its hinges, but it clattered unceremoniously against the wall. He’d howled Keith Kogane’s name—like a bear caught in a trap, like a dying man screaming for mercy, like a war cry. Like the fate of the world relied on finding Keith wringing out his hair in the corner, a towel tied safely around his waist.

The nature of Keith and Lance’s relationship had been up for debate for quite some time. Some students say that Lance has been methodically planning Keith’s murder—hiring a hitman, or planting death traps around the compound to finally end the little showoff, once and for all.

Some students say that Keith kicked his ass, some time near the beginning of the semester. Some say that Lance caught Keith cheating on a test, but the higher ups covered the whole thing up and Lance could never prove it.

But some students regale the story of their morning class—of Lance’s obvious erection, tight in the front of his uniform pants. Of the way that he’d gaped at Keith across the room, while Keith had only looked at him with that same bored expression that he offered to everyone and everything but Takashi Shirogane.

Some girls talk of a possible secret tryst. They swear up and down that the outbursts and bullying are all part of an elaborate ruse to hide their relationship. Others argue that Officer Shirogane and Keith’s relationship is far too tender, that Keith wouldn’t possibly settle for someone who seems to hate him so much when Shiro is so kind to him.

And maybe they’re all wrong. Maybe nothing is quite as strange as it seems.

But the word around the Garrison is that Shirogane was messing around with the both of them, that Lance found out about Shiro and Keith, and as a bitter act of revenge, he punched Keith right in the face, in front of everyone.

The higher ups could never prove that anything happened that day.

When questioned, Keith told them that he was injured while he was sparring. Lance refused to admit that he’d ever been in the locker room at all. And Shiro was far too trustworthy, far too respectable and responsible for anyone to truly believe that he’d risk everything just to sleep with two lower ranking officers.

Nothing could ever be proven, and no one was ever punished.

But the word around the Garrison was that Lance had punched Keith so hard that his head had spun, that they could almost see the tiny, cartoonish birds flying around his head as he’d fallen to the floor.

And this rumor would live on long after one of those two cadets disappeared.

Passed down from student to student, every newcomer would someday hear the story of the cargo pilot who punched the fighter pilot so hard that he left school and never came back.

It’s a cautionary tale—an anecdote to teach any new students to be vigilant, and to never, ever treat lower-ranking officers with anything but respect.

 

* * *

 

Lance’s heart thunders in his chest as he slams open the locker room door. He’d always imagined what true rage might feel like—how it might feel to be the Hulk, ripping off his clothes, seeing that proverbial red at the corners of his vision, feeling so out of control that he might be able to overpower men three times his size.

But there is nothing freeing about the anger that he feels right now. There’s no relief that he’s come to always expect. If anything, he feels bound by simmering bars, feels as though he’s a hamster in a ball—hurling himself forward and searching for an escape, some excuse not to feel this way anymore, but the more he moves, and the more he thinks about everything, the more rage fills the deep caverns of his chest.

He can feel his voice tearing through his throat, the scrape of his words against his windpipe like the feeling of sand trapped in the bottoms of his shoes. It’s an uncomfortable sensation, but he can’t stop himself from yelling again. He can’t stop himself from doing anything until he spots Keith.

Keith is staring at him boredly from the other side of the locker room. He doesn’t quite register the fact that he moves forward to meet him, doesn’t feel his legs moving so much as he watches Keith’s figure grow larger and closer until he’s near enough to reach out and strangle if Lance so wishes to.

He doesn’t falter this time either, as he might have in the past. With his arms straight down at his sides and his hands balled into tight, shaking fists, his voice is raw and far too loud, but he still manages to speak.

“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?!”

Keith furrows his brows. His hair is damp and dripping down his neck over his bare shoulders. He pauses and stares, for only a moment, as though there’s some right answer to any of this and he can’t figure out what it is.

“I’m… drying off. What, do you just get dressed without drying yourself, or—”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it, you sneaky bastard! Did you really think that you could keep pretending that everything was fine without telling me?! Did you really think that I’m so stupid that I wouldn’t figure it out?!”

“Okay, so… you’re worked up about something. Okay. Can you keep it down? Or are you going to make a scene again?”

His cavalier response only fans Lance’s anger, higher and higher, until the flame of it consumes him. His eyes widen, he swallows hard. It takes everything within him to lower his voice, although he can still hear it bouncing around them as he tries, desperately, to put all of these feelings into coherent words.

“I’m not _“worked up”_ , you fucking asshole! I’m pissed off! You just think you’re so cool, don’t you?! You think you’re hot shit?! You think you’re better than everyone else just because you can ace a stupid simulation, but guess what, Keith? You’re not better than everyone else! You can’t just go around doing whatever the fuck you want without any consequences! Other people have feelings! _Unlike you_ , other people actually care about things!”

Keith twitches, and while Lance admits that he’s never actually seen him truly angry, he can tell that he’s struck a cord. He almost continues on, almost says so many things that he’ll regret later just to knock Keith down a peg, but Keith cuts him off.

“Lance, you’re being crazy, so I’m going to get dressed and go to my next class. You know, some of us actually go to class, remember?”

It’s enough to break the levy of Lance’s emotions. He knew that Keith would belittle him. He knew that he would give him an excuse to act out. He knew that Keith wouldn’t know how to handle these sorts of emotions, that regardless of how hard he might try, he's not experienced enough with relationships to understand how to comfort someone when they’re lashing out.

He knew that Keith would give him the excuse that he needed to get violent, to hurt something.

In the deepest parts of his heart, even as his body seems to move on its own, ever as he swings a misshapen fists forward and cracks it against Keith’s face, he feels regretful. He feels like the lowest lifeform in the entire universe.

Pain bursts from where his knuckles connect to Keith’s cheekbones, burning all the way up to his elbow. The movies never alluded to any pain. They’d never warned him that punching someone with all of his strength might hurt him as well.

His mother might tell him, if she ever found out about any of this, _“Well, sweetheart, when you set out to get revenge, you’ll always end up hurting more than just the other person. In the end, you’ll always end up hurting yourself too.”_

He’d just never known that he should have taken that warning so literally.

Keith takes the punch like a professional. He leans off to the side only slightly, his head barely turning as Lance’s fist knocks against it. He stands very still then, frozen in place. He doesn’t seem surprised. He doesn’t behave as though this is the first time that anyone has ever hit him.

But he doesn’t look Lance in the eyes. He doesn’t insult him. He doesn’t berate him for not knowing how to hit another person properly.

He swallows, eventually, straightens himself out. His brows are low and drawn, his lips pulled tight into that same horrible, flat line that Lance has just now started to get used to. He doesn’t reach up to touch his face. He doesn’t do anything but stand there, shoulders squared, as the whispers around them grow so loud in Lance’s ears that the world begins to spin.

Lance is shaking now, his legs are weak and rubbery. His fist and his throat, the gaping hole in his chest—they hurt so terribly much. The pain is pulsing, spreading over him in waves. His vision is blurred with tears.

“Y-you should have told me about Kerberos,” he croaks, so much quieter—so feeble and pathetic, but Keith jumps as though he’s been hit again. “You should have… _just told me_.”

He feels outside of himself. He feels as though the world is nothing but the rush of air around him, the cold of the hall as he bursts through the door, the absence of steam around him, the heat of the mid-morning sun beating down on the hard earth under his feet.

He runs from Keith’s horrible expression, from the awful, foreboding way that he’d accepted Lance’s abuse without argument or retribution. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s ruined everything now, that he’s done something so terrible that he won’t just get expelled. That he’s behaved in such an ugly way that even Shiro won’t be able to forgive him.

He runs until he’s midway across the courtyard, until he can see the front gates sizzling in the heat against the sandy horizon.

Hands on his knees, he leans over and sucks in long breath after breath. He shakes and shakes and forces down the bile rising in his throat.

He forces himself not to think about how sad Shiro had looked last night. He forces himself to forget about how much he’d scared Hunk.

He forces himself to pretend that he didn’t just hurt Keith, after he’d spent so much time trying to convince him to trust him.

He pretends that he hasn’t just hurt everyone who matters to him here. That he hasn’t just shattered his own world—that he hasn’t just reacted in the worst way possible, and proven to everyone that he’s just as dumb and ill-equipped to handle bad news as they’d suspected.

It’s so hot that sweat rolls down his face within minutes. The air in his lungs in thick and stale.

He thinks about Shiro’s beaming face, staring out into the darkened auditorium the very first day that he saw him. He thinks about Keith’s small smile as he held that lighter to his chest.

He thinks about his mother back home, and how disappointed she would be if she could see him right now.

And eventually, as the sun continues to beat down on him and large, fat clouds move around in the big, blue sky—

Lance McClain cries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! Happy Tuesday!  
> So I know this seems weird, but here I am, with the first extra chapter for the next few weeks. I figured, as a sort of Holiday present, that I’d upload two chapters per week until the first week of January, so there will be… three total extras. I just sort of thought, you know, a lot of people are on winter break, it’s the holidays, might as well get a decent chunk of writing out there since we’re getting so close to the end of this story!  
> And I know… this chapter is the worst present ever. But! It’s a blessing in disguise, I promise. Because Thursday is closer, so it’s less time to sit around being very angry at me for making you read this. See, there’s a real method here!  
> This sort of leads me to the next point that I wanted to make, which is: I do not condone Lance’s behavior. I don’t condone Keith’s or Shiro’s. Please understand that I don’t think this is okay!  
> That being said, a special thanks to TLaw for helping me with the title of this chapter! It’s kind of a joke, really… like a tongue-in-cheek sort of title. It’s a Spanish idiom which means “A barking dog doesn’t bite”, which… doesn’t seem to be the case for Lance here.  
> Anyway, thanks so much for reading! See you Thursday!


	21. Kiss With a Fist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For once, the right words might not be able to fix this.

Shiro has never been very good at lying, even when it really matters.

His mother always knew when he’d stayed up late reading books under his blankets with a flashlight, or when he’d skipped school, when he got older, to hang out with Keith. His brother covered for him sometimes, sure, but only because even Ryou knew exactly what sorts of things he was hiding, no matter how hard to tried to keep them to himself.

It had been hard to keep secrets from anyone when he was a child. His mother was always so supportive of any decision that he was passionate enough about that he never felt the need to hide the truth for very long.

And maybe he should have tried it out, just so he could familiarize himself with the concept. Maybe he should have tested those waters first, when he was young enough to get away with doing something wrong.

But as it is, he tells his group that he needs to leave the auditorium to speak with his commanders, despite the fact that nearly all of their commanders are currently directing the other tour groups around to get their lunches and sit down for their mock-up orientation assembly.

He tells Commander Hendrick at the door that he has indigestion, cups a hand over his belly and wobbles a bit from side to side. This earns him a hesitant pass into the hall, at least, and a wary order to have the nurse call him if he’ll need a replacement for the remainder of his tour.

At the very least, it allows him to search for Lance. It gives him some time to think, to figure out what in the world must have happened between them for Keith to come to him so suddenly.

Keith hadn’t been much help, before he’d taken off to find refuge on the only rooftop with a keycode that he could crack. His feathers had been ruffled, Shiro could tell. He’d been upset about something when he’d reached out, but he was far too determined that Shiro needed to focus on Lance right now to talk about it.

The angry red swelling on his cheek had concerned Shiro, and when he’d reached out to touch it—so careless, without thinking—Keith had jerked away from him as though his fingers might burn.

It’s still the same as when they were kids, he tells himself. Keith still hides away sometimes, still can’t handle the myriad of emotions that swell up inside of him. He doesn’t know how to reach out for help, maybe doesn’t trust other people not to hurt him when he’s already down.

After all this time, he’d still rather mend his physical and emotional wounds all alone in the stuffy desert heat, instead of allowing Shiro to escort him to the nurse and talk him through it.

He shakes his head, threading his fingers through his hair. He isn’t sure where Lance likes to hang out when he’s not in the locker room. He isn’t even entirely familiar with his dorm number. He’d come across it only once a few weeks back, while filing paperwork, and he’d felt like too much of a creep to ever venture through that specific hall in search of him.

But maybe someone else would know.

If Keith felt so inclined to interrupt his tour in order to warn him, Lance must have caused a scene.

And if Lance caused a scene, surely, someone would know where he ran off to.

 

* * *

 

Lance drags his wrist over his nose, sniffling miserably and burying his face in one of his workbooks for cover. He’s sitting on a ledge just outside of the rec room, his back pressed firmly against the window, and he’s doing his damnedest to pretend that he’s a normal student, studying for a test that he knows he doesn’t have, instead of an idiot sniveling off by himself with his tail between his legs.

He isn’t sure when he’ll feel okay again. He doesn’t know how long it will take before he’s willing to face Shiro or Keith. He doesn’t know how to apologize for hurting another person, no matter how much he still feels like they deserved it.

And right now, he wishes that he could talk to his mom. He wishes that she didn’t work from morning until evening, that he could call her work and ruin everything for her as well, like the selfish child that he’s proven himself to be, just so someone could comfort him and coddle him and tell him that everything will be okay.

He lets out a pitiful sigh. The words on the pages in front of him are blurry around the edges. His eyes sting and his throat feels rough. His knuckles ache.

He listens to the sound of people passing by—catches the ends of excited murmurs, the rumors about the Kerberos mission. He feels like the biggest moron on the planet.

It shouldn’t matter so much that Shiro is going away. It shouldn’t mean so much that neither Shiro or Keith thought to tell him.

But it does matter, and it matters a lot.

He doesn’t know what to do with everything that he’s feeling right now. He doesn’t know how to express himself, or who to even express himself to. He’s burned just about every bridge imaginable today, feels too foolish to talk to a counselor—because what would he even say? How could he explain why he feels like such a useless moron just because Shiro might be going away on a big mission, without outing all three of them and surely getting Shiro in a lifetime of trouble?

And it’s not fair, he knows that. He knows that none of this should have happened. He should have never fallen for Takashi Shirogane, should have never reached his greedy fingers so close to the sun. He never should have thought that he wasn’t going to get burned.

“Mind if I join you?”

He jumps at the words, at the sound of someone speaking so close to him. At the idea that anyone would take a moment from their own life to notice how sullen he looked, jammed in such a tight ball in the corner of the hall.

And of course it’s Shiro smiling down at him, when he lowers his book and risks a teary look up at the person looming above. Of course Shiro would have found him, of course Keith must have told him what happened.

Of course this is the end of everything, when he hasn’t even taken the time to prepare for it.

Instead of yelling, instead of pointing that accusatory finger in Shiro’s direction as he had with Keith, he only nods dumbly, straightening his posture and lowering his book, and his gaze, into his lap. He can feel Shiro’s body heat slide gently next to him, feels the subtle spike of his own pulse skittering through his veins, feels the color rise to his cheeks and the fresh tears welling up in the corners of his eyes.

He doesn’t want Shiro to ask how he’s feeling. He doesn’t want to be handled as though he might break, because, in reality, he really might.

He doesn’t trust himself to be a reasonable adult right now. He just punched his boyfriend in the face. He just ran off sobbing like a little kid throwing a fit.

“I’m sorry.” Shiro tells him, in that same sad voice from last night. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Shiro reaching up to run his fingers through his hair, his chest expanding as he draws in a deep breath. “I know I should have told you. I was just… I was so scared, and… I thought you might get the wrong idea about everything else, so… I kept putting it off, but I shouldn’t have. I should have been honest with you from the beginning.”

Lance wipes hurriedly at his eyes, willing away the new tears. He sniffs again, clearing his throat as quietly as he can manage and forcing himself to sit straighter, to appear confident in a way that he just can’t bring himself to feel right now.

“You thought that I’d overreact,” he asserts. Shiro shakes his head, and for the first time, he doesn’t laugh.

He doesn’t act like any of this is cute, like any of this is anything but as serious as Lance feels like it is. He doesn’t tell Lance that he’s childish for being upset. He doesn’t tell him that he’s overreacting.

His eyes are dark and hard, his mouth is a firm line. He looks to Lance as though there are so many things that he wants to say right now, but instead, he lets out a long breath through his nose, curses quietly, and leans back against the window in silence.

They sit there, for a long moment, listening to the students making their way from class to class. They listen to the static of the television in the rec room. They listen to each other’s breathing, and think about everything that they’re too afraid to say.

And finally, after a while, Shiro turns his gaze back in Lance’s direction.

“I really do love you,” Shiro tells him, “And I’m sorry that I let you down. I should have been more responsible, and I should have cared more about how this would affect you than I did about how scared I was to tell you. I was a coward, Lance, and I was wrong. I understand if you’re angry with me, but… I hope that you understand that none of this has anything to do with Keith. I… I didn’t tell him either. He had to find out for himself as well.”

It takes Lance a long time to comprehend everything that comes after  _ “I love you” _ . He’s so flustered, so awestruck hearing those words coming out of Shiro’s mouth that he can barely piece together the perfectly articulated apology that follows.

With his mouth agape, his heart sputtering at record speed, he stares wide-eyed in Shiro’s direction for a humiliatingly long amount of time.

“I—” he snaps his head away, shaking it furiously. He swallows, breathing hard and fast and struggling to think straight as a smile finally breaks out over Shiro’s lips. “I—I love you too!”

He’s practically yelling at this point. Shiro’s smile broadens, he lets out a loud, nervous laugh.

“I’m glad, Lance, but I don’t think you should be yelling—”

“N-no, I—I really do, Shiro! And—and I don’t blame you, really! You’re such a good person, and you’re still my hero! It’s… it’s great that they chose you, and you really deserve it, but I just… I just—I think I’m gonna really miss you, and you’re gonna leave me alone with that bastard Keith, and I just—I just don’t know if I can handle being alone with him for a year without killing him, so I think—”

“Okay, okay, Lance, I get it!” Shiro’s hands are waving in front of him, his voice alive with that familiar, musical laughter. He reaches out and rests a reassuring hand on Lance’s shoulder, and Lance wonders, as he snaps his mouth shut and ignores the way that his cheeks catch fire, if this spell that Shiro has cast over him is really so powerful that this is all that it takes to make him feel better.

And, after a moment, with more guilt that he’s comfortable admitting, he wonders if he should have found Shiro first, instead of starting a fight with Keith.

Shiro seems to know where his thoughts are headed. His smile falters, only a little. His eyes are half-lidded, his lips so full and kissable that it takes everything within Lance not to lean forward and attack him in front of all of the eyes that are now watching them.

“I know that you fought with Keith, Lance.” Shiro says slowly, carefully, as though he isn’t entirely sure what he’s getting himself into. “He wouldn’t tell me what happened, but… I think you should talk to him about this.”

Lance bites his lip, unsure of what to say. Part of him feels as though their relationship could use a little honesty—that Shiro has given him the perfect excuse to out himself for the dirty, violent asshole that he knows that he is. That maybe, given the current situation, he might get a free pass to avoid any lectures, since Shiro surely feels so guilty about this entire thing that he wouldn’t dream of telling Lance that he coped with this shocking news in the wrong way, but…

He feels bad even considering it, putting all of the blame on Shiro’s shoulders as though he himself isn’t responsible for his own actions in a time of crisis. Shiro’s plate is ridiculously full as it is, without having to worry about babysitting himself and Keith as well. And it seems as though Keith is more than willing to pretend that nothing happened between them, so maybe…

He furrows his brows, swallowing his guilt and flicking his eyes from Shiro’s face to his boots against the floor. It wouldn’t hurt to leave out some of the more unflattering details, just this once. The less Shiro has to worry about the two of them once he leaves, the better everything will be, right?

“I… I don’t think he’s gonna want to talk to me after I got mad at him like that.”

It’s simple enough that maybe Shiro will think that they had one of the less violent, more vocal fights that have become so commonplace with them by now that no one even bats an eye anymore. But he can feel Shiro’s gaze, hot on his face, for a moment longer than he’s comfortable with—nearly long enough that he almost breaks his resolve and spills his guts, tears already ready to start rising back to the corners of his eyes.

But the moment passes, and Shiro starts talking again—telling him about the other rooftop that Keith likes to hide out on, the only one with a keypad that Keith cracked the code to long before Shiro even knew that he was sneaking up there.

“He’s surprisingly savvy with technology when he puts his mind to it,” Shiro laughs, scratching idly at the back of his head, his cheeks dusted pink, “It’s off of the south corridor by the commanders’ lounge. The password is  _ 0825 _ .”

It’s enough of a nudge in the right direction that Lance can hear him loud and clear—despite the fact that Shiro never says explicitly that he expects for him to go there now and reconcile, even though he still isn’t entirely sure what to make of everything that went down between them. And, of course, Shiro has no way of understanding that things might not be that simple, that it was a horrible, treacherous thing for Lance to seek him out, just waiting for the excuse to fight with him. That no matter how angry he’d felt in that moment, no matter how foolish or betrayed, he should have never resorted to violence.

At least, that’s what he knows that Shiro might tell him, if he knew.

That’s what anyone with even an ounce of reason in their heads might tell him if anyone but himself and Keith, and a room full of shocked onlookers, could ever understand why he’s so intent on dragging his heels and possibly living out the rest of his life without ever seeing Keith again.

He lets out a long, tired sigh, wondering if he could pretend that he’s just too shaken up to go out there right now, if maybe there’s an excuse that he could conjure up within the next few seconds that might convince Shiro that he’s in no fit state to have any additional emotional heart-to-hearts today—especially with someone as _ heartless  _ as Keith.

But Shiro is rising from his seated position before Lance can even muster a single thought into words, before he even has the time to come up with any excuses that aren’t too flimsy and don’t give too much damning information away.

“I have to get back to my tour group.” Shiro tells him, beaming down at him with a grin so brilliant that Lance’s heart leaps up into his throat, and his tongue swells three times its regular size. “I’ll find you after your last class, okay? We can talk more then. Good luck, Lance.”

He’s gone after a short wave, after another beautiful smile and a warm pat of his hand against Lance’s shoulder. Lance watches him making his way down the hall, in the direction that he apparently came from, feeling hopeless and spineless and positively terrified as he considers the scarce amount of options that he’s been left with.

One: He could find Keith and apologize, risk the inevitable ass-beating, risk seeing what the bastard looks like when he’s really, truly angry and thirsty for blood. Risk seeing whatever ugly mark he must have left flourishing on Keith’s perfect skin, and realizing, for the billionth time today, that his actions actually have consequences and Keith might not want anything to do with him after he pulled such a ridiculous stunt.

Or, alternatively, two: He could pretend that none of this ever happened. He could betray Shiro’s trust and slink off into his dorm room for the rest of the day. He could apologize to Hunk later on for running off in such a rage, and he could slowly fall back into the pattern of his old life, as though this bizarre relationship never happened at all.

Neither option sounds particularly pleasant, but he has to admit that one of them sounds a Hell of a lot more miserable than the other.

It’s just, unfortunately, the one that won’t result in Keith kicking the ever-loving shit out of him off on some abandoned rooftop, where no one will ever find his mangled corpse.

With much resignation, and a long, frustrated sigh, Lance pushes himself up off of the ledge of the rec room window, gathering his things back into his school bag and making a mental note of the stairwell that Shiro mentioned just moments ago.

He can imagine the general layout of the place—might have even passed by it during the earliest days of the semester when he’d gotten turned around on his way to class—but there’s nothing particularly notable near the commanders’ break room. He isn’t entirely sure what compelled Keith to find that particular rooftop in the first place.

It feels a lot like he’s headed toward his inevitable end, as he slings his backpack over his shoulder and begins the slow journey to the other side of the building. It feels as though these are the last steps that he might ever take. He tells himself that it’s worth it, to die in Shiro’s name—to perish under the angry fists of the biggest asshole that he’s ever had the displeasure of meeting, if only to make Takashi Shirogane smile.

He realizes, just as he reaches the stairs, that everyone was right about him all along.

There’s nothing beyond that door that he can’t handle. Keith is a solid three inches shorter than he is—he doesn’t have the reach. He’s too stiff, surely, to win in a fair fight.

He’s a drama queen, through and through, he understands now.

But he still fumbles with the keys as he punches in the code on the pad beside the door. His heart still ricochets wildly within his chest.

And he still takes a final moment to compose himself, before pushing open the door—because he can’t prepare himself for the Keith that he finds on the other side, bathed in the orange glow of the sun, wound tight into a ball at the edge of the roof.

Staring out over the compound with hard, distant eyes, a growing bruise dark against his perfect, porcelain skin.

He’s not prepared to find the sadness that he finds in Keith when he steps onto the roof. He doesn’t know how to handle the small twitch of those shoulders, the tenseness of his muscles under his clothes.

He doesn’t know what to say about any of it. So he sits down silently, a few feet away.

And they watch the clouds moving slowly through the sky, the sun dipping down toward the horizon. They wrap themselves comfortably in the oppressive desert heat, listen to the drills down below.

It’s a long time before either of them speak. He watches Keith, out of the corner of his eye. He considers how low his brows sit above his eyes, how he’s glaring so hard at their peers running around in the courtyard that he wonders if Keith’s gaze alone might set them ablaze. There’s something peculiar about the straight line of his frown, about the way that he’s sucked in his lips and pressed his tongue into the side of his cheek.

It’s oddly… human. It’s as though Keith might be brewing real emotions somewhere in the stony ridges of his heart, as though there’s something swirling around in his thoughts that Lance never knew he was ever capable of feeling at all.

And he feels, far too belatedly, very, very guilty.

He berates himself mentally for constantly convincing himself that Keith can’t feel anything. He knows, deep down, that even the coldest person feels sad sometimes—that even the most deplorable humans in history knew how to love, and how to mourn, and Keith isn’t a cold blooded warlord or a sociopathic business man. He’s a normal boy. He’s a scared kid.

He’s just as human as anyone else at the Galaxy Garrison, no matter how inflated and Godlike he’s become in Lance’s idyllic, bitter eyes.

“Look, Keith, I—”

“I know why you punched me.”

Keith turns his gaze in Lance’s direction so suddenly that the wind rushes out of his lungs. Immediately, he feels like an insect pinned in place, like a butterfly with its wings pierced to cork board, as though he’s helpless to fly away. As though he can’t do anything now, under the weight of Keith’s eyes peering into him.

His jaw feels slack and heavy. He doesn’t have the strength to close his mouth, to wipe the surprise from his face. Keith’s words are gravelly and low. He’s looking at Lance with nothing but regret—with so much emotion welled up inside of him that Lance wonders if all of this is nothing but an elaborate dream.

It doesn’t feel right. He wants to run away. He doesn’t want his effigy of Keith to crumble like this. He doesn’t want to bear witness to another hero falling—to another person who he thought he had all figured out surprising him in the very worst way.

And he hates himself for always thinking like this: For making legends out of people, for expecting everyone who he loves to play the same tired roles, to never be _ just people _ , with the same flaws that he so desperately despises within himself.

“I—” Keith bites off the end of that sentence and tears his gaze away. Lance can finally breathe again, drags in a few lungfuls of air, grasps a hand against his chest to still his heart. “I hated myself too when I found out—when… when I knew that he was leaving. I—I should have been happy for him. I should have just pretended that I didn’t know until he was ready to tell me.”

Keith is watching the cadets down below, his gaze looping around as they run laps. Lance doesn’t miss the contempt in his eyes, the way that he judges them, as though he hates them for living such carefree lives. As though he doesn’t understand an existence that isn’t the same perpetual, desperate uphill battle.

Lance wants to ask him if the rumors about him are true, but he knows that now isn’t the time. He wants to know where he grew up. He wants to know everything that Shiro already knows. He wants to understand why Shiro’s eyes soften sadly when he talks about Keith’s odd behavior, why he seems to realize where the root of it is—why that realization somehow hurts him and why no one still seems to know where the two of them met.

He wants to make Keith think of anything but Shiro leaving, but he’s still too dumb to talk. And he can’t think of anything that won’t hurt Keith anyway—anything that would be easier than admitting his own self-hatred, his own cowardice, the selfishness that sleeps within him too.

Instead, he stays quiet. He waits for Keith to tell him more.

He doesn’t know if it’s the right thing to do, but as he watches Keith watching everyone else from above, his heart tells him that, for once, the right words might not be able to fix this.

“But I’m—” Keith curses quietly. His hands grip his knees against his chest so tightly that his white knuckles shake. There’s a dampness to his eyes that Lance pretends not to notice. There’s a tittering to his words, a strange pattern of dips in his speech as he forces himself to talk, and Lance tells himself that it’s okay. He can listen to this without reading too much into it. He can allow Keith to be vulnerable without breaking down in his place. “I’m  _ scared _ , okay? I just… I feel like he’s always going away, and I can’t… I can’t chase him this time. I—I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without him.”

There’s quiet after that. Keith drags in a shaky breath, buries his face between his knees. It seems as though he’s said just about everything that he can manage to say, as though he’s exhausted himself just from venting that much, as though he’s so unused to talking about his feelings that all of this is too much, too fast.

Lance leans back, placing one hand against the ground and dragging the other over his sweaty face. He tips his head back and looks at the sky, imagining the way that the stars speckled out over the black of the night, how Shiro’s gaze had reflected them like twin, dark mirrors.

He thinks about the mess that he’s made and left festering within Keith, how stupid he was to assume that all of this was okay when Shiro was already so worried about telling him the truth. How he’d convinced himself that yelling at Keith would make all of this better somehow, without contemplating the idea that Keith himself might have been keeping secrets as well.

And through the guilt, through the regret, he wonders if he’s allowed to feel flattered that Keith is willing to talk to him about this at all. His heart flutters nonetheless. His cheeks feel warmer than he can rightfully excuse away with the desert heat.

“You’re supposed to fight with me, duh.” He says finally, his eyes trained to the sky, his heart a racket within his ribcage as he wills himself to say everything that he hopes Keith needs to hear. “You’re supposed to use that sneaky bastard brain of yours to figure out how we’re going to contact him while he’s in space. And you’re supposed to start sneaking out with me at night like you do with Shiro, until people start talking about us like they do about both of you.”

Keith is watching him now, one brow raised in confusion. There’s a smile tugging at one corner of his lips, an instantaneous smoothing out of his stiff muscles that Lance tries not to feel too cocky about.

“Seriously Keith, I know you’re good at collecting rumors, and frankly, I’m offended that I haven’t heard any about us yet! You need to up your game, buddy, or I might have to start spreading some rumors of my own!”

As though Keith’s subtle happiness isn’t enough to burst his heart, as though it’s not nearly overwhelming enough to find himself on the receiving end of a rare Keith Kogane smile, Keith breathes in shallowly, his brows knitting together, his lips pulled wide from ear to ear as he tips back his head and starts laughing.

Keith laughs, that strange, bubbly laugh. And he’s laughing at Lance— _because_ _of Lance_ , because Lance told a joke that he seriously thought was funny enough to earn _genuine laughter_. And it’s beautiful in its awkwardness, in the way that it ebbs up and down, how it’s loud sometimes, then terribly quiet. How it’s raw and rough, like he’s blown the dust off of an old cassette tape that he hasn’t used in years.

Lance doesn’t know what compels him to speak, and he’ll be mortified about this moment for the remainder of his miserable life, but he listens to Keith’s laughter slowly dying away, watches the cute splash of color rising on his cheeks, notes the way that he’s even pretty with that ugly bruise—even pretty when he’s sweaty and overheated in the sweltering sun.

And he says, so blunt, so tactless, “I really love you.”

Just like that.

With none of the charming charisma that Shiro had offered him before. With no impact but the widening of Keith’s eyes, the flood of red into his cheeks, the uncomfortable little puff of breath that pushes out of his lips as he sobers up instantly.

Lance curses himself mentally. He’s so horrified that he can’t even try to defend himself.

And they sit, again, in silence. Neither of them are willing to look at each other for a very, very long time.

He focuses on the students doing exercises in the courtyard, on trying to figure out what time it is from the position of the sun in the sky. He even resorts to pondering how many grains of sand might be out there around the compound alone, how many years it might take to count all of them, and if he’d still feel like such an irredeemable jackass once he was done.

He starts thinking about Shiro leaving them alone, about the very real possibility of the short shelf life of their current relationship—the idea that he and Keith will actually be alone here in less time than he’d originally anticipated, and what they might do to fill the lonely days without him.

And he understands, finally, why Shiro must have wanted to invite him into their relationship. Because Keith is more than capable of surviving here alone, even if he doesn’t have faith in himself right now. Keith is popular, even if he doesn’t know it. He’s the kind of guy who could take his pick of any clique around the school if he so wanted to, could make just about any cadet his best friend with little more than a smile and a few nice words.

But Keith, he knows, is a special kind of person. Beneath the comfortable brick wall that he’s built around himself, beneath this facade of a cold, hard “bad boy” with no regard for anyone else, maybe Keith is more sensitive than he seems. And he’s lonely, and worried, and he needs someone to seek him out when he tucks himself away, someone who will make dumb jokes and lighten the mood, who will remind him that it’s okay to fall down sometimes, if only he remembers to get back up.

And Lance knows that he, himself, needs a person like Keith to drive him forward. He needed to hate Keith in order to try. He needed a rival to fuel his determination to come out on top, even if he’d fumbled that opportunity so terribly that he still feels the sting of rejection months later.

He understands that the two of them are too similar to have ever gotten along without some kind of push. He understands that Shiro could see something in both of them that he knew he could piece together to form a full picture.

And Shiro knew that he would feel comfortable tucked between them, that even from so many miles away, he could feel at home, knowing that they were both waiting for him to come back.

“You know,” he says eventually, fueled by his inner monologue and feeling a little bit too romantic for his own good, “It was a huge dick move for me to hit you earlier. I—I’m sorry, man.”

Keith snorts, straightening out his legs and leaning back with his hands placed firmly behind him. He tips his head to the side, watching Lance with a lazy half-grin and low-lidded eyes.

“It looks uglier than it is,” he says blithely, teeth hinting through his lips as he grins, “You gotta work on forming a proper fist, cargo pilot. I bet it hurt like Hell, didn’t it?”

Lance sputters for a moment, but he knows deep down that Keith is right. But they haven’t gotten to that part in self-defense class yet! How was he supposed to know how to punch someone properly if they haven’t even went over it?!

“T-that’s not the point, asshole!” he howls, jumping to his feet and flailing his arms in the air, “I hit you! That’s—that’s really shitty, okay?! It doesn’t matter how “bad” it apparently was! I-I’m not supposed to hit you!”

Keith lets out another laugh, but it’s more of a sarcastic bark than anything else. He pushes himself upward, rising to his feet, hands on his hips as he tips his head to the side and offers Lance another one of his famous blood-boiling, shit-eating smiles.

“I’ll teach you sometime, alright? I taught Shiro too, so it’s not like you’re the first useless fighter I’ve ever had to train.”

Lance huffs, crossing his arms over his chest. He taps his foot a few times, biting his lip and staring off over the ledge of the roof. After a moment, he pushes his breath through his nose, closing his eyes in a small show of composing himself, before turning his gaze back to Keith.

“It’s still not fair, Keith. How about… how about you punch me too, so we’re even? Then we’ll just go back to, you know, not hitting each other so Shiro doesn’t start getting too worried.”

He drops his hands to his sides, readying himself for the blow that he knows won’t come. His eyes slide closed, his breath hitching in his throat. He’s never been punched before, not even playfully, and he isn’t sure how he feels about the prospect alone of offering himself up so carelessly.

Deep down, he understands that Keith would never hit him like this. He might ready himself for it, might raise his hand in anticipation, but he’ll take one look at Lance’s pathetic, trembling frame and feel too guilty to actually do it. He’ll understand that Lance is only trying to be the bigger man here and apologize by trying to make things right. He’ll realize, finally, that violence is never the answer, and that Lance is more than willing to own up to his mistakes and deal with the consequences.

And he might be telling himself that Keith will kiss him instead. That he’ll find soft, warm lips planted gently against his cheek in place of a hard fist. That Keith will finally see him for the big, brave man that he is and beg for him to take him back to his room and ravish him until Shiro gets done with his stupid tours and finds them tangled up in the sheets together in Lance’s room.

Shiro will be so overcome by passion when he finds them there, when he realizes that Lance surpassed all of his expectations and made everything right with this simple suggestion alone. And they’ll fall even more deeply in love with him, so desperately, so wholly that they’ll wonder why they ever doubted him at all.

Maybe then, Shiro will join them for round two, or three, or four—

Keith’s fist feels like a two ton boulder as it crashes against his unwitting cheek. It’s so hard that the resounding crack of it echoes in his ears, even as he loses his footing and finds himself tumbling down to the ground. The pain of it is belated, the deep, throbbing ache all the way down into his gums as his hands scrape against the concrete and he lets out the most undignified wail that he never imagined that he could ever make.

His eyes snap open, terribly wide. He’s stunned silly, for a moment, as he lays on the ground and brings a scuffed hand to his throbbing cheek, staring up at Keith with surely the most dumbfounded expression that he’s ever seen.

Keith is shaking the pain from his fist, that cocky, lopsided grin never having left his face. He leans forward, crouches down to offer Lance a hand that immediately, Lance slaps away.

“Y-you—”

Lance’s entire face pulses with pain. Tears prickle at the corners of his eyes. The world spins for a split second around him, tilts off to the side and lurches forward as a sense of vertigo overtakes him. Adrenaline pumps like solid ice through his veins, numbing the hurt in his mouth just enough that he can choke out a few accusatory words.

“Y-you actually _ punched _ me!”

He pulls himself into a seated position, his fingers ghosting over his cheek. It’s so hot that he can feel the warmth of it radiating against his palm, even a few centimeters away. It’s so sore that it feels as though his pulse exists only there, just beneath the surface of his skin.

Keith looks scandalized after a moment, when he realizes that Lance isn’t going to laugh and tell him that he’s just pulling his leg, that he wasn’t secretly thinking that Keith wasn’t actually big enough of an asshole to hit him when he knew that he was bluffing all along.

“You told me to punch you. Are you seriously going to act like you didn’t just tell me to do it, because I heard you say it, cargo pilot. You can’t go back on your word just because it hurts—”

“I-I know that I told you to, but you weren’t supposed to actually do it, asshole!”

Lance is screeching so loud now that he knows that, surely, the entire compound can hear him, but he doesn’t care. He feels so betrayed now, more by his own stupid romanticism than anything else, because why did he ever think that Keith wouldn’t be too thick-headed to recognize a cheap gesture when he saw one? Why would he ever think, after everything that he’s learned about Keith, after he’s experienced how straight-forward he is, how he takes everything at face value, that he wouldn’t interpret an offer to punch someone as anything but an open invitation to do just that?

“If you didn’t wanna get hit, why would you tell me to hit you?”

There’s another offer to grab his hand, to be helped up. Lance takes it this time, albeit angrily, whining miserably about his sore jaw long after he finds himself standing firmly on two feet.

“I—I just, I thought it would be like in the movies, okay?! You’re supposed to like, appreciate the idea of me offering to let you hit me, then just… kiss me instead or something, I don’t know! You just weren’t supposed to actually hit me, you prick!”

Keith breathes a laugh, another small smile tugging at his lips. He stares at Lance for a long moment, their hands still linked together, before leaning forward and planting a small, hesitant kiss on the opposite cheek.

“There.” he says simply, before tugging his hand from Lance’s with noticeable color painting his face. “You got your kiss and you got your punch. That’s more than they get in the movies, apparently.”

And Lance knows that he should still be angry, but Keith is smiling, even as he makes his way to the door. He’s overstimulated himself again, maxed out his frightfully low capacity for romantic moments, and surely he needs to slink off somewhere alone to recharge.

Lance isn’t sure what feels more vibrant to him in this moment, as Keith slips through the door and allows it to fall closed behind him. There’s a fuzzy warmth buzzing against one cheek, where Keith kissed him. An aching heat where his fist connected against the other.

He stands outside for a long time after Keith leaves, smiling like an idiot, waiting until the pain melts from an angry, bitter shame into a battle scar that he decides to wear with pride—until he realizes, with an embarrassing amount of enthusiasm, that they’ll be sporting these ugly marks together—like friendships bracelets, like promise rings.

He isn’t sure when Keith’s prickly edges started to seem more charming than annoying, when his stupid grins became more handsome than insufferable. When every weird thing that comes out of his mouth started sounding like the most beautiful music, instead of a growing list of reasons why Lance wanted nothing more than to be rid of him.

And Keith never said _ “I love you too” _ , not with Lance’s earlier enthusiasm, not at all. He didn’t flush like a pretty schoolgirl or cover his face. He didn’t stumble over his words or make any attempt to tell Lance that he might feel the same way.

But the heat against both of his cheeks tells him everything that he needs to know, and it’s so  _ Keith _ , so unique to their ridiculous relationship, that even later on, when Shiro frets over his ugly bruise and frantically asks him if everything is okay, he won’t be able to offer him anything but a dumb, lovestruck grin.

The same one that he’s sure that he’s wearing right now too.

He isn’t really sure when he started falling in love with Keith Kogane, but after all this time, he finally understands why Shiro’s so enamored with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s Thursday, and I am back again! Hello, and sorry for… Tuesday. Just all of it. But I hope I can make it better now.
> 
> Next week, I’m hoping to be a little bit more punctual with my Tuesday posting time, since this week, I’m in this weird kind of… “post-vacation” haze. Still haven’t managed to get my sleeping schedule in order or anything! But hopefully I’ll be back on track by then. 
> 
> Anyway, as always, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it!


	22. So Long, and Thanks for All the Sex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Goodbyes are never truly goodbyes, unless you don’t ever come back.

The next few weeks pass, in what feels to Lance like no time at all.

The Spring semester begins with a bang—with Lance absentmindedly forgetting that he’d went through the trouble to be approved for an early-morning class, and practically jumping out of his skin when his alarm went off an hour earlier than he was accustomed to.

And he’d cursed both of them—both Shiro, who he’d felt guilty being angry with, and Keith, for whom he hadn’t felt even an _ounce_ of guilt—before throwing off his blankets and making use of the bathroom in his dorm for the first time that he could really remember since the first day at the Garrison.

Hunk had groaned miserably and rolled over in his bed, smashing his pillow over his face.

 _“Are you gonna scream like that every morning?”_ His voice was muffled, but Lance was able to make out his annoyance just fine.

But he’d reassured himself that there was a good reason for all of this.

He’d made a silent promise to himself that he would keep an eye on Keith in Shiro’s absence. That he’d be there for him, and do his best to fill in that big, empty, dreamboat-shaped hole to the best of his ability.

And in order to do so, he’d realized that he needed to have the afternoon off, so they could study together in the library.

Shiro had signed off on it easily, but not without warning him that he might not like waking up early for the first week or so.

And like an idiot, like a total, absolute moron, he’d responded, _“What’s one less hour gonna do? I could breeze through these classes in my sleep!”_

He hadn’t realized at the time that he might actually end up spending most of his first period dozing off.

Those first few days had been hellish, and he’d woken up just before the library closed numerous times to find that Keith had left him behind. He’d been yelled at in class more times than he could count. He’d snoozed during lunch periods, nodded off over dinner with a very worried Hunk, silently scrutinizing his every stretch and yawn.

But now, a week later, he feels as though he might finally be getting the hang of it.

And once he gets to this point, where he can look at his calendar and feel coherent enough to actually understand the date printed on it, he realizes, with more dread than he’s even felt in his life, that the date of Shiro’s departure is drawing only nearer and nearer.

Keith told him that everything would be fine, as he was curiously clipping random articles out of the magazines from the rec room that Lance could have sworn were for public use only. He’d tucked them away into an unassuming folder, clicking his scissors in the air in Lance’s direction at random at he talked.

_“Don’t get yourself so worked up over it, cargo pilot. It’s gonna be okay. He’ll be gone for a year, then he’ll come back. Not everything has to be some big ordeal.”_

Lance hadn’t been convinced then, and he still has his doubts now. It was something about Keith’s eyes, he thinks. Something about the sharp corners of his downturned lips as he’d talked, something about the defensive walls that he’d been building up the more he tried to be reassuring.

It was like talking to some kind of animatronic carnival display. Like the fortune teller in her little glass booth, who might take his fifty cents and tell him, dutifully, _“There are many opportunities in your future.”_

_‘There definitely isn’t any reason for you to be feeling this ache of dread in the depths of your belly every time that you think about Shiro going away.’_

_‘Nothing is going to happen to him. So stop acting like all of this is the end of the world.’_

He hasn’t had the guts to bring it up to Shiro, who’s been so busy with preparations lately that he’s only caught the smallest glimpses of him in the halls. He shows up to their library dates only when they’re nearly done for the night—resting a hand on Keith’s shoulder apologetically, sending Lance that same, soft smile. But his wings seem as though they’ve been clipped, as though he isn’t so sure of his decision to go out on this big mission either.

There’s an excitement radiating off of him, sure, and maybe Lance is only projecting when he thinks that he also sees fear there, too. That somewhere, deep down, maybe Shiro has the same bad feeling about this that Lance does. The same awful dread that Keith continues to deny that he has even an inkling of.

They’re sitting in the library now. Lance nearly dozes off over his homework five times, and Keith pauses every so often to prod him with the sharp edge of his pencil to wake him up. The sleeve of his uniform is marked with so much graphite now, smudged where he wipes over his wounds with his fingers. He’d slept fitfully last night.

Because tomorrow…

Tomorrow Shiro is leaving.

“Listen,” Keith whispers suddenly, raising his workbook to cover his face against the rest of the room as he leans forward over the table, “Shiro wants to meet us here after curfew. Midnight, got it? Do you remember which way to take to avoid the night patrol?”

Lance nods dumbly, barely awake enough to believe that any of this is actually happening.

Why in the world would Shiro want to meet them here, of all places? What could they even do in the library?

Sure, there are lots of fluffy couches lining the walls. There are wide windows that he’d be lying if he said that he hadn’t thought about being pressed up against. There are endless shelves that he might grasp and hold onto during—

“Are you gonna be there or what?”

His response is a garbled mixture of “of course” and “absolutely”. Something pitifully embarrassing like, _“of-o-lutely”_ , but Keith only jerks a nod and returns to his homework. He’s fifty pages ahead of where they’re supposed to be.

Lance wonders what he’ll do at the end of the year, when there’s no more work for him to do. He wonders if Keith might reach Shiro’s rank before he can even hope to make fighter pilot.

He zones out for the rest of their time together, thinking about where they’ll be this time next year. Keith, surely, will still be the top of the class. He’ll be so renowned by then that they’ll be posting his dumb, pissy scowl on all of the enrollment pamphlets. He’ll be the person taking Shiro’s place, giving the welcoming speeches with so much less enthusiasm. He’ll rule this place, surely, and Lance wonders, miserably, if he’ll still be scrambling to pull himself up from the bottom of the pack.

But Shiro will be back too, he thinks. By this time next year, everything will return to normal.

He’ll come back to them with many stories to tell. He’ll laugh about his space-legs, about how rubbery his muscles feel under so much gravity. He’ll tell them about the ice shards on Kerberos, about the freeze-dried peas and the shrunken pellets that he’d been forced to eat for dinner. All of the mundane day-to-day of the large gap of his absence.

He’ll tell them that he missed them every day, that he’s so happy to be back that he’s never leaving them again.

It’s a nice thought, at least. It’s pleasant enough, daydreaming about Shiro’s return after a long stretch of time without him, that he almost forgets that he’s going away at all.

 

* * *

 

 **Codename** : Ethan Hunt

 

 **Objective** : Infiltrate the Galaxy Garrison library undetected

 

Later on, Lance will deny any unfounded accusations from Keith that he’d seen him barrel rolling down the hallway while humming the _‘Mission Impossible’_ theme song quietly to himself.

He’s breathless by the time that he makes it out of his dorm hall, so he resorts to crouch-walking instead. He’s scaling the walls, brushing away all memories of stalking behind Keith in a very similar fashion. His thoughts are a swirl of damp-tentacled aliens, horses in cowboy hats, Keith’s pink tongue lapping at the eraser of his pencil in class—a myriad of ridiculous imagery that shouldn’t be making him nearly as excited as it is.  

But the library is drawing nearer, and through the tall glass doors, he can see the shadows of two other figures moving about inside.

The security lights flicker on as he stands and makes his way toward the door. He flinches, eyes widening and heart leaping into his throat as the figures turn to look at him. He can’t make out their faces, but he can already imagine how Keith’s probably rolling his eyes. How Shiro’s reassuring him that no one should be making their way through this hall in the next half hour anyway.

He shakes off his nerves, shrugging playfully and forcing a casual sort of lopsided smile onto his lips. The shorter shadow waves an arm in front of it, motioning as though it’s turning a handle. More waving, more handle-turning. He rolls his eyes.

And he nods, shoving down his annoyance.

Does Keith really think that he’s too stupid to know how to open a door?

Just as he’s reaching for the handle, both shadows jump forward, waving their dark, blurry arms in the air and pacing hurriedly toward him. He steps back as Keith’s face comes into view through the glass. His eyes are nearly black now, hooded under thick lashes and tightly drawn brows.

“You’re a fucking idiot.” His voice is muffled through the door. “Can you really not read fucking sign language? You don’t know what _‘no’_ means?”

“Keith.” Lance swallows his rage as Shiro’s voice presses through the glass, as he hears the click of Shiro’s keycard sliding through the slot and the tiny beep of it unlocking. “That wasn’t even sign language. And it’s dark. How was he supposed to know that the door automatically locks?”

Keith crosses his arms over his chest. Shiro pulls open the door with an apologetic smile.

“Maybe if he wasn’t wasting time rolling on the floor, he could have made it in here before the timer ran out.”

Lance grabs the edge of the door, slamming it closed behind him a little too loudly as he stomps into the room. He’s inches away from Keith’s face in seconds, glaring at him down the bridge of his nose.

He’s too insufferable to be this pretty, Lance thinks. He’s far too hard to handle to be so intoxicating, even as he’s parading around like an asshole who’s better than everyone else.

“I wasn’t rolling!” Lance whisper-yells, stabbing a finger into Keith’s stupid, firm chest. “Have you never heard of _stealth_?!”

Shiro places a hand on each of their shoulders, expertly pulling them apart. If he’s exasperated, he doesn’t show it. If anything, Lance might think that he looks a little bit… _exhilarated_.

“Guys, please,” he says quietly, peering around them into the hall just as the security lights turn off, “We don’t have a lot of time. Do we really want to waste it fighting?”

Keith lets out a loud breath, throwing his hands to his sides. He glares at Shiro for a moment, his eyes so hot and full of life that Lance almost swears that they’re lighting up the room.

“Fine. You wanna get this over with? My pleasure.”

Shiro doesn’t even get the chance to finish telling him that he doesn’t want to “get this over with”, but to spend the night peacefully, before Keith grasps Lance roughly by the wrist, dragging him forward a few paces before grasping Shiro as well.

He pulls them toward the back of the library, ignoring how they stumble around in the dark. Lance isn’t entirely sure why he’s having such an easy time navigating in here, but he knows better than to question it.

Keith’s eyes are reflecting the dim light around him—the moon and the stars through the window, the security lights from far-away halls through the cracks of the doors, as the night patrol passes through. It’s inhuman, almost, and for a moment, he’s reminded of his confusing alien fantasies.

He risks a look at Shiro’s direction. His eyes are engulfed in shadows. He seems just as blind and useless now as Lance is.

He can’t finish this thought, because Keith is stopping—throwing down Shiro’s hand and reaching forward with flat palms to shove Lance hard into a fluffy sofa that Lance can’t even make out until he’s landing haphazardly onto it.

Keith is on him like an animal—biting at his bottom lip until he opens his mouth, plunging that hot tongue inside of him and tasting every inch that he can reach. Shiro makes a flustered sort of huff somewhere above them, and Lance can barely make out the silhouette of him fumbling around with something in his pockets.

Keith’s claw-like fingers rake under his shirt, pushing it up to expose his belly to the stagnant, dark air. He’s making a warm, wet mouth-journey from Lance’s lips to his throat, pausing only to dig his teeth into places that Lance never would have thought would send skitters of pleasure straight to his groin.

“J-Jesus, Keith.” Shiro’s voice is a breathy drag somewhere in the thick wall of blackness in front of him. “You didn’t have to pounce on him like that… Maybe, let him breathe a bit, okay?”

Keith’s lips pop off of the hollow of his collarbone, a long strand of saliva dragging out between them before severing off. Keith cranes his neck—to glower at Shiro with a confusing level of accuracy, Lance presumes. He forces a knee between Lance’s thighs, pressed firmly against the tenting erection in his uniform pants, before giving Shiro a piece of his mind.

“Do you know how long it’s been?” He hisses, “How long it’s gonna be? You really expect me to waste time?”

Shiro’s fuzzy outline raises his hands in front of him in surrender. Keith’s knee presses harder against him, almost painfully. Lance bites out a curse, slamming his eyes shut and forcing down all of the pathetic moans that he can feel bubbling in his throat.

It’s too early to already be this close. But Keith is right, he thinks. It has been a long time since the three of them have found a night to be alone like this.

He flinches as Keith’s teeth dig back into his skin, tugging lightly as he sucks at his collarbone. Further down, he pops the buttons of Lance’s shirt so hard between his fingers that, for a moment, Lance worries that he might be tearing them from the fabric.

Shiro tuts behind him, drawing near enough that Lance can finally make him out in the dark. He watches Shiro’s blurry figure reaching out and ghosting his hands over Keith’s hips, before leaning forward and fumbling with something around his belly that Lance isn’t coherent enough to see.

Shiro’s face rests on Keith’s shoulder now, as he continues messing with God-knows what between them. Lance can feel Keith lifting his hips, grunting softly against his skin as he finishes undoing the last button on his shirt, tugging it open gracelessly.

“You’re already so hard,” Shiro whispers, his voice like smoke in the air, “Does dominating Lance like this really get you so excited?”

Lance has never heard Shiro talk dirty since he’s met him. Before now, he couldn’t even imagine it. But his cock lurches upward in its confines, begging for attention. Precum drags against the fabric as he wriggles desperately, silently begging Keith to pull down his fly. He’s squirming and slack-jawed, dumb under Keith’s roving touch.

“I brought everything that you asked,” Shiro continues, “Does Lance know what you plan to do to him tonight?”

Lance feels a shiver ripple through him. He grasps hard at the edges of Keith’s shirt, wishing more than anything that he wasn’t wearing anything right now. He’d love nothing more than to trace every inch of Keith’s chest with his lips—to press him down into the plush couch and drag out all of those adorable noises that he’s always so embarrassed about.

Shiro pulls back, and Lance hears the clinking of metal jostling, feels the slide of fabric against the tops of his thighs. Keith’s backside is pressed high in the air above him, high enough that Lance can make out the perfect heart of each cheek illuminated in what little light the stars outside offer through the windows.

His eyes widen, his heart clamors in his chest. Shiro tosses Keith’s pants somewhere behind him. Lance doesn’t know if Keith wore underwear or not tonight, but he’s not wearing them now. He’s naked from the waist down, his bare erection prodding between them as he slouches forward and takes one of Lance’s nipples roughly between his teeth—poking it with the tip of that hot tongue.

Shiro’s big hands are between them, fiddling with the buttons of Keith’s uniform shirt. Lance likes the feel of him there, wiggling around between them, a barrier between himself and Keith’s heat, which threatens even now to engulf him.

Keith’s fingers crawl from his chest down to his belly, scoring hot sensation deep into his pores. He groans as the blunted edges of his nails drag into his navel, as Keith’s teeth bite down hard into his chest. He’ll be littered with marks tomorrow, he can already tell.

He’ll be wearing the battle scars of his final night with both Shiro and Keith proudly, for everyone to see.

He perks up slightly at the sound of a bottle being uncapped. Shiro has pulled away again, and Lance can barely make out the glossy outline of a familiar plastic shape in his hands. He’s drizzling it over his fingers, creasing his brows as he worries his teeth in his bottom lip. Lance likes to see him like this, privately. Vulnerable and nervous. Stripped of the courage and charm that he usually wraps around himself to shield his insecurities from a hard and misunderstanding world.

He likes to know that he can make Shiro feel safe enough to shake away his walls. That maybe, in time, he can make Keith feel just as comfortable shedding his protective skin.

Keith’s chest is exposed, when he finds the strength to look down. The buttons of his shirt are popped open, his undershirt pulled up and tucked under his armpits. Lance can barely decipher the dark, pert outline of his nipples, hard in the night air. He can feel the bare skin sliding over his belly, as Keith drops down to the floor between his feet.

Those dark, shockingly reflective eyes watch him, unwavering. A snarky smile spreads out over Keith’s lips.

“Take off his pants, Keith.” Shiro instructs, rubbing his fingers together as he discards the lube on the floor. “Get him ready.”

Keith’s teeth find his thigh through the thick fabric of his pants. He can feel the heat of it—the wetness of his saliva, damp and frustrating. He keens pitifully, arching his hips in a quiet begging for more.

“Are you okay with this, cargo pilot?” Keith’s voice is fire blazing through the thick of the silence, through the heavy hum of his breath, through the pounding of his heart. “You think you’re ready to go all the way?”

Keith’s fingers linger just above the button of his fly. His knuckles press into Lance’s belly, just below his navel.

He nods once, lost for words. His thoughts swim desperately. His tongue is fat and dumb and useless.

But Keith doesn’t move an inch. He continues to watch, continues sitting still as though time itself has frozen in this moment, until Lance can find the right words to say.

Finally, breathlessly, “Y-yes, I’m—I’m ready. I want to do this.”

Shiro muffles a laugh just a short distance away. The bright light of Keith’s eyes jerks in his direction immediately.

“I’m sorry.” Shiro moves closer, but he doesn’t reach out. He only stands there, just close enough that Lance can see his outline, watching as Keith grumbles and turns back to grasp the waist of Lance’s pants with more fervor. “It’s just—why don’t you ever ask me if I’m ready? I’m starting to feel like you might have a soft spot for Lance.”

Keith yanks open his fly, jamming down the zipper so hard that it actually does hurt this time. The groan that sputters out of his lips is one hundred percent out of pain, he swears it. He’ll swear it until the day that he dies. He isn’t into this. He isn’t hoping that Shiro keeps egging Keith on, just so he can see how much Keith can make this hurt.

That would be ridiculous, really. What kind of pervert gets off on pain?

“I don’t have to ask you,” Keith responds, moody and short-fused as always, “you’re already begging for it before I even touch you.”

This shuts Shiro up long enough for Keith to squeeze Lance’s pants over his hips. He doesn’t speak again until Keith’s tugging his ankles free of them and tossing them somewhere in the general direction of his own clothes.

“So… what’s the plan here, Keith? Am I, uh—”

“You’re going to pass me the lube and the condoms, then you’re going to sit down and touch yourself until I’m done with Lance.”

Keith’s bossiness clearly does something to Shiro that frankly, Lance could never hope to understand. Shiro’s movements are jerky and eager as he leans down and grabs the desired items dutifully, placing them in Keith’s outstretched hand and sitting down next to Lance on the couch. They’re a little cramped here, and for a moment, Lance thinks about the three of them squeezing into the locker room shower. He thinks about how it might have felt if he’d stuck around and touched them both back then, how he’d wanted to, before his anxiety had gotten the better of him.

Keith bites down into his bare thigh this time, flicking his gaze up to watch his face as he uncaps the bottle in his other hand. It’s an impressive sight, really, that he manages to get it open in the dark without even looking at it, but Lance doesn’t have the mental capacity to feel as proud of Keith as he thinks he should.

The feeling of teeth on otherwise untouched skin sends a whole new level of sensation striking through him. He feels already far too used, too raw and overstimulated. The noise that warbles out of him is nothing close to human.

“Keith, p-please…"

Keith pulls him up then, hands cupped in the hollow of his knees. He drags him forward until his backside hangs just over the edge of the couch cushion.

His fingers are warm and wet, slick with lube, as he draws them in slow circles between Lance’s cheeks. He presses lightly against his perineum, dipping forward and dragging his tongue just under the head of Lance’s erection. His eyes are white hot. The fingers of his free hand dig so hard into Lance’s thigh that he can already imagine the crescents of his nails leaving angry, red marks there.

There’s a squelching just to Lance’s right, and for a moment, he’s far too trapped in too many sensations to be curious about it. But his eyes roll in that direction naturally, as Keith bends further down and takes just the head of his cock beyond his lips. As he sucks painfully light, his fingers push firmer against him until the tip of one slips inside.

He’s making noises now that he isn’t particularly proud of. He’s squirming, biting down onto his bottom lip—gasping out a mumble of a groan as he locks eyes with Shiro, touching himself and watching him too.

It’s dark, but his eyes adjust. He traces the shadows in the deep creases of Shiro’s abs, lingers on his open shirt, on the dark stretches of skin and the black dots of his nipples. Shiro is shuffling slightly, pumping his erection and working his pants over his hips awkwardly. And he smiles at Lance when their eyes meet, because he’s Shiro. Because he can’t help but offer comfort even during a moment like this.

And Lance swears that his life ended and he’s living out the rest of his existence in a dream. He swears that none of this could possibly be a reality.

Because when Keith slides a finger inside of him, all the way to the knuckle, Shiro kicks off his pants, worries his lip between perfect, straight teeth.

And his erection bobs miserably as he lets it go. As his oily hand travels through the small brush of his pubic hair, over his testicles, all the way down until he’s sliding a finger inside of himself as well.

He’s spread out here, writhing and on display. There’s a prickle of pleasure blossoming inside of Lance as Keith’s finger expertly avoids a spot that he knows might send him over the edge. Shiro adds another finger as he watches, but Keith keeps playing it cool. He takes it dreadfully slow, barely puts the right amount of pressure anywhere to give Lance even a semblance of relief.

Just as Keith adds another finger—as pleasure boils hot in Lance’s veins—he pulls his mouth away, breath dewy and heavy as it fans over Lance’s newly neglected cock.

“Lance, I want you to do something for me, okay?”

It takes Lance nearly double the time to realize that Keith is talking to him than it should. He nods again, slower this time, before letting out his best attempt at an affirmative hum. Shiro rattles out a moan, arching his back. The couch shifts beneath them, creaking under their weight.

“You see Shiro, right?” He’s talking as though listing off piloting instructions. As though all of this is so mundane and average to him that he barely needs to pay attention. All the while, he scissors his fingers inside of Lance, stretching him out, barely skimming his prostate in the most impressive show of assholery that Lance has ever seen. “You see him touching himself, watching you? Do you know what I want you to do, Lance?”

Lance shakes his head. He bites down on the inside of his cheek. Thinking is such tiring work right now. Thinking is the last thing that he wants to do.

“N-no, ah, K-Keith, I don’t—”

“I want you to put _this_ —” he pulls his free hand from Lance’s thigh, reaching up and grasping the base of Lance’s dick firmly in his fist, “inside of him. I want you to fuck him. Can you do that for me?”

He would murder a man for Keith right now, if only he’d keep moving his fingers around. If only he’d promise to touch him just like this for the rest of his life.

Shiro lets out a long, deep groan. He tips over on the couch, until he’s close enough that his shoulder collides with Lance’s and his lips find the side of his neck. The gentle way that he drags his teeth over Keith’s old marks is startling. For a moment, he almost doesn’t notice him there.

Until Keith pulls away, until his fingers slide out and he’s pushing himself up from Lance’s legs onto his feet, and Shiro is grasping Lance by his hair and swallowing his disappointed moan into a kiss.

Everything moves a little fast after that, as he feels Shiro’s big hands grasping him by the waist and hoisting him into his lap—as their erections bump together and he finally realizes exactly what Keith is asking of him.

Lance pulls away from Shiro with a pop of their lips. He stares down at him, wide-eyed and terrified, swallowing thickly and struggling to catalog all of his rushing thoughts.

“A-are you sure?” he asks meekly, “Shiro—d-do you… do you really want _me_ —?”

“Of course I do,” Shiro presses that same soft smile against his mouth, “I want you, Lance. So… so please, if you want to, too…”

The statement fades away into the shadows. Shiro peers up at him, just as Lance remembers him sometimes watching Keith.

With admiration, with love. With a devotion that he still isn’t sure that he deserves.

“I-I love you.” Lance tells him, hopelessly embarrassed.

But Shiro’s smile only widens. Somewhere to the side, Lance can feel Keith’s figure stiffening.

“I love you too,” Shiro says, ”and Keith, I also love you.”

As Lance presses a foot to the floor, adjusting himself so that he’s more comfortable between Shiro’s legs, he hears Keith scoff.

“Do you really have to be so corny?” Keith asks. “Like, can we do this without saying embarrassing stuff like that?”

Lance throws a cheeky grin over his shoulder, sliding his hands just behind Shiro’s knees and lifting them to either side of his waist.

“It’s only embarrassing for _you_ ,” he croons, “it’s not our fault that you think you’re too hardcore to say _‘I love you’_ to your boyfriends.”

He can imagine the indignant frown that Keith’s surely hurling at him, but he’s too busy turning his attention back to Shiro to care. Keith can get huffy all he wants. He can pout about their love and pretend that he doesn’t feel it too.

But Lance is going to lose his virginity tonight regardless, so really, he couldn’t care less.

“Are you ready?” His voice is barely above a whisper. “Is this… is this okay?”

Shiro squeezes his arm between them, grasping his lube-covered palm around Lance’s erection and pumping lightly. He pulls away moments later, craning his neck and leaning upward, pressing their lips together in a soft, dizzying kiss.

“I’m ready,” he says gently, but firmly, “it’s okay, Lance. Take your time.”

And maybe later on, if he ever has the guts to recount this story to another person, Lance will say that he actually took his time. He’ll swear that he didn’t slide inside of Shiro with a swiftness that startled even himself.

But regardless of the unfortunate reality, Shiro takes all of him without more than a quiet hiss and a jerk of his hips. He laughs, teeth gritted, and digs his fingers into Lance’s biceps with a strength that’s pathetic compared to Keith’s earlier, careless force.

Lance tries to apologize, but it comes out as nothing short of a long, drawn out moan. And Shiro kisses him again, tells him that it’s okay. He can sense Keith moving about somewhere behind him.

And when he moves, he feels as though the stars have aligned. As though the universe itself has overloaded and rebooted, as though he’ll never feel this good or this whole ever again, as long as he lives. Because Shiro is hot and he’s tight around him. He feels so much better than any mouth, any hand, anything that Lance could have ever imagined.

He rolling his hips back, thrusting shallowly. Shiro is touching himself, pushed forward and back as Lance moves about. His eyes have rolled closed, his head tipped back. His shirt falls open to expose more of his firm, perfectly sculpted chest.

Lance feels as though this is the most connected to reality that he might ever be. He can feel everything now—Shiro wrapped around him, his heartbeat in his throat. Keith’s calloused fingers digging into his hips, spreading his cheeks apart.

He can feel those fingers again, dipping inside of him. He can feel the displacement of air as they’re pulled away, what feels like a mere heartbeat later.

And he can feel it when Keith prods something bigger and warmer against him, as it slides slowly, carefully inside.

He can feel the pain that hurts so much better than the pleasure. He can feel himself stretching out, swallowing up that heat, that firmness. He can feel Keith moving, nails in his skin, teeth in his neck, hair tickling his shoulders as the three of them rock together.

Keith doesn’t pull his punches now. He doesn’t avoid that spot inside of Lance that sends stars springing in front of his eyes. He doesn’t stop moving and doesn’t stop holding him far too tightly. He doesn’t slow down and he isn’t gentle.

And Lance loves every moment of it. He’s strung out between both of them, connecting them, lost in so many sensations. Melding into the moans and the pleasure, the hot breath, the stinging teeth, the hard nails.

Shiro cums first, with a gasp and a sharp dig of his fingers into Lance’s arms. Lance realizes belatedly that no one handed him a condom. What was the point of bringing them? What was the point of preparing if—

He pulls out quickly, splattering cum over Shiro’s chest. Keith bites out a noise. He can feel himself tightening up around him, can feel Keith shudder and slacken against him.

“Shouldn’t have pulled out.” he can feel the words brushing over his skin. “Should have made him deal with the mess, the asshole.”

And Shiro laughs at that, thanks Lance sweetly for being considerate.

And Lance doesn’t respond to any of it.

He feels like he might cry.

He can’t explain the emotion that fills him up, the feeling that he’s packed so tight that he might explode.

But he loves them both so much, his heart might burst.

The world is moving so quickly around him, but he’s stuck in this single thought. He’s frozen and encapsulated in it—like an insect trapped in amber. Like a fossil, petrified.

Keith pulls out of him, more carefully than he’d pushed in, clicking his tongue as he wanders away to dispose of the condom that Lance belatedly realizes that he’d taken the time to put on. Shiro is pulling Lance close, kissing the wetness on his cheeks, telling him how much they both love him, how good it was, how great he did.

And this moment continues to ring in Lance’s heart, even as they pack their things and sneak back to their rooms.

Even as he slips into fitful, worried dreams.

He never stops feeling as though the three of them have connected for life. As though nothing—no amount of distance, no eerie forces somewhere in the trenches of space—can ever keep them apart.

Three planets, he thinks, in perpetual orbit.

Revolving around each other, until the day that they die.

It’s a nice thought, at least. Good enough that he allows himself to drift off into sleep.

 

* * *

 

“Lance? _Lance_?”

Someone is shaking him.

He bats away their hand, grumbling as he rolls over and searches blindly for a pillow to cover his face.

“Dude, seriously, get up! The Kerberos crew is taking off in fifteen minutes! You’ve slept through like, three alarms!”

Kerberos? He scoffs. That’s stupid. Hunk doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Kerberos doesn’t take off until the morning. He still has time. He just went to bed a few hours ago.

“Lance, are you kidding?! Are you really going to let laziness get in the way of saying goodbye to Shiro?! Lance, man, that’s cold. Come on, seriously?! D-dude, you barely even have enough time to get there now—seriously, get up!”

Hunk shoves him hard enough that he barely has the reflexive time to stop himself from rolling off of the other side of his bed. Before he can lash out and tell Hunk off, however, his eyes catch the numbers on the clock.

And he realizes, with much horror, that Hunk is right.

He should have left thirty minutes ago.

This is the worst thing that he could have done.

He flies out of bed, slipping against the floor and nearly landing right on his face. He scrambles for his clothes, pulling his pants over his pajamas, barely managing to button them before pulling his uniform jacket over his shoulders. He can feel his hair standing up in all directions, can taste his morning breath, can feel all of Keith’s marks pulling at his skin—but for once, he doesn’t care.

“Hunk!” He screeches, “Why didn’t you wake me up sooner?! I-I gotta go! I’ll see you later!”

He steps into his boots, neglecting to tie them. He waves a hand in the air as Hunk struggles to explain that he’s been trying to wake him up for an hour now.

“N-no time, Hunk, we’ll talk later! I gotta go!”

He doesn’t bother to close the door as he races out into the hall. A group of students chatting in front of the room across from theirs flinches back in surprise as he barrels by. His mind races as he tries to remember where Shiro must be waiting for him. Down one hall, backtrack, down the next. His body is on autopilot. He’s tripping over his laces, sliding awkwardly in his loose boots. His jacket floats out behind him as he runs.

People point and stare, people whisper, but he doesn’t care.

He just needs to see Shiro. This one last time before an entire year apart, he needs to see him before he leaves.

Professor Montgomery yells to him as he speeds by, but he ignores him.

Further, further forward. He doesn’t stop until he throws open the heavy doors, until he steps out into the oppressive sunlight and catches sight of the crew readying themselves to board their ship.

And he can see Shiro, yards away, with a hand on Keith’s shoulder. He can see Sam and Matt Holt posing for photos with a young girl and an older woman.

He lunges forward, staggering out into the humid and the heat. His adrenaline pumps so hard through his veins that he doesn’t even think about being embarrassed when everyone’s eyes turn to him.

He trips over his laces a final time, just as he’s close enough that he can see the disdain on Keith’s face.

“It’s about damn time.” Keith grumbles, but his eyes are glassy. His frown is stiff and flat. Under Shiro’s big hands, Lance thinks that he might be trembling.

“Lance.” Shiro’s smile is wet. His eyes are red-rimmed and raw. “I’m so glad to see you, I—I thought maybe… you wouldn’t come. I know that goodbyes are hard.”

Lance feels his heart shove up into his throat. He feels his eyes welling with tears.

“N-no, I… I slept in, but… but I wanted to see you.”

Shiro reaches out, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder. He draws him slightly closer, leaning forward as his smile spreads out wide.

“I can’t kiss you in front of everyone,” he says, so quiet that Lance can barely hear him above the roar of the ship, “But I love you, okay? I want… I want you and Keith to take care of each other while I’m gone.”

Lance nods, wiping the dampness from his nose and blubbering something so incoherent that he isn’t even sure what he’s trying to say.

But he manages, just as Commander Holt pulls away from his family and announces that they need to leave, to force out, “I-I love you too. I… I’m going to miss you.”

Shiro’s responding grin is poignant. He draws in a deep breath, pats Keith once more on the shoulder before shoving his hands in his pockets.

“I guess this is it.” He says.

And he walks away.

Just like that, so quick and simple that Lance is left dumbfounded. That he’s left feeling as though, even as the ship sets off into the sky, that Shiro might return to them any second.

Keith’s eyes are hard and guarded as he watches the last specks of Shiro disappear beyond the clouds. His arms are crossed over his chest, his jaw tight, his shoulders rounded and stiff.

The breath that he pushes out is a long rattle. He turns stony eyes abruptly to the ground.

And he turns to Lance then, his dark hair blowing in the breeze, the sweat beading at his temple twinkling in the early morning light.

“You look like shit,” he says, “And your breath smells.”

It’s surreal after that, for the first few hours. For the first few days.

Keith practically drags him into the locker room to get cleaned up. They bicker, they fight. They slip into the shower. Keith touches him again, and he touches Keith. It’s different now, without Shiro. It feels, to Lance, as though the walls are way too wide. As though there’s too much empty space around them.

They find a way to fill those extra hours, on a weekend when neither of them can focus on studying or Keith’s amateur sparring lessons. They pretend that everything is normal, for awhile. Shiro is busy. He’s not gone for good.

Everything is going to be just fine.

Eventually, Lance convinces himself that nothing has changed.

Eventually, Lance trains himself not to think about the big hole shot straight through the center of their lives.

But for the longest time, Keith’s eyes don’t lose that glossiness.

And for awhile, Lance wonders if they ever will.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, happy Tuesday! I hope you guys had a nice weekend. And if you celebrated any holidays, I hope you enjoyed them!
> 
> So this chapter and Thursday’s chapter were both the final ones that I wrote, in that order. Which is weird, now, because I’m posting them before a lot of other things that I wrote nearly five months ago. But that’s what you get for writing all over the place, isn’t it? 
> 
> Regardless, I hope you enjoyed this one! Thanks for reading!


	23. Light the Fuse, Watch it Burn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s been over three months since he left,” Keith tells him, “I think we should commemorate it.”

The first few months in Shiro’s absence are difficult, but somehow, they learn to live without him.

Lance starts to notice things about Keith—how he stares just a little bit longer out of the window during their afternoon study sessions, how he draws into himself at odd intervals and it seems as though he might never smile, or laugh, or even  _ talk _ again.

But slowly, like the winter fading into the spring, like the snow melting away—somewhere far off with four seasons, where Lance has never lived before—Keith’s hardness ebbs away again, revealing all of the warmth that Lance is always so relieved to find in him.

He doesn’t know if it’s loneliness, or if Keith is really so lost without Shiro around that he isn’t sure how to feel.

But of course he’d never be stupid enough to ask.

Lance gradually gets used to waking up an extra hour early every day for his first class, and he relishes the quiet reprieve of these moments where he can wrap himself up with Keith and no one else.

His peers in the cargo pilot course regard him indignantly. They turn their noses up at him as he stumbles in tiredly at the start of the regular school day, whisper among themselves about how silly it is to try so hard when obviously none of the fighter pilots are going anywhere.

They think that he’s trying to get ahead somehow, and maybe that alone is funny enough to make all of this worth it. Maybe the exhaustion and the stress, the piles of paperwork, and the embarrassment of asking around for recommendations might have actually been worth it just so he could find himself in this situation with his classmates every day.

This must be how Keith feels all the time, he thinks. This must be how it is when everyone around you seems to have an idea of what you want and why you’re living your life how you are. When no one could ever understand the secret needs within the depths of your heart, and you’d never be stupid enough to actually tell them.

He isn’t sure if he likes it or not—being like Keith. Or being ostracized.

His mother is proud of him for being a “go-getter.” That’s how she’d phrased it. It had taken everything within him not to laugh at that, and to tell her, so belatedly, that he’s definitely going out and getting _ something _ , but it’s not nearly as _ “Rated G” _ as she probably thinks.

He’s sitting alone with Keith, in their tiny little corner of the library one day—fourteen weeks into Shiro’s absence on a nondescript Wednesday—when Keith looks at him with that same nonchalance that used to embed itself like barbs under his skin.

He tells him, so casual and low, as though he doesn’t care how it sounds. As though he doesn’t care if everyone in the library hears them and what they might think of it, “We should sneak out tonight. To the practice ships again.”

Lance doesn’t know exactly what to say then, to a proposition like that. He still doesn’t know how to talk to Keith in that same way that Shiro used to—in that soft, comforting voice that always used to make Keith hot in the cheeks and rubbery in the knees.

So he nods, like a dumb idiot.

He nods and he agrees with a nonsense noise, and he buries his face in his book even as Keith’s hand slides against his thigh under the table.

“It’s been over three months since he left,” Keith tells him, “I think we should commemorate it.”

_ It’s what Shiro would want from us. _

He knows, he knows.

 

* * *

 

It’s less of a spectacle when he ventures down the stairs, through the halls—all the way beyond the winding trails of dark passages late at night, that he once followed through behind Keith—than he remembers it being the first time. Or really, any of the numerous times during the last few months that he’s made the same journey to random destinations to meet up with Keith. 

He doesn’t have anyone to impress here, he thinks. There’s no smiling Shiro waiting for him through the door, no sexy alien mystery to be solved, no secret scheme swept under the rug that needs to be picked up and dusted off. And so, he walks normally. He’s practiced and purposefully calm. He’s truly the secret agent that he always imagines himself to be in his fantasies.

No one comes down here at night, that’s what Keith told him. The patrolling officers stick to the hallways upstairs. They don’t think that anyone could possibly be sneaky enough to slip down here undetected. And what would they even do once they got down to all of these empty halls anyway?

It’s not like Takashi Shirogane might have left a couple of troubled lower ranking officers all of the overriding key codes to the doors.

When he reaches the room, all the way at the end of the shadowed hall, he isn’t surprised to find that it’s already cracked open. And he isn’t surprised either, when he steps through, that Keith doesn’t call out to him to tell him where he’s hiding.

Lance thinks that Keith likes it this way—forever watching from the shadows. Watching him squirm in his discomfort of the dark. Sitting and waiting to be found, like some sort of pretty prize to be won, like some kind of delicately wrapped package with a cobra just waiting to strike inside.

The imagery alone is enough to drag a shaky laugh out of him. But he hasn’t brought a flashlight and he can barely see anything in here—in a big, open hanger in the dark. He moves through the empty skeletons of practice ships with no pilots, while a sneaky, cheating bastard lies in wait for him to turn his back before he can pounce.

Keith is ruthless. That’s what he’s learned since Shiro left. Keith refuses to allow him to ever get close enough to really reach him—always keeps him at arm’s length. He’s skittish about receiving pleasure even on his good days, and impossible to touch for more than a few seconds on his worst.

And Lance is left floundering here—in pleasure, in frustration. In absolute confusion as to how Shiro managed to put up with such an incorrigible lover for so many years without flipping his lid.

He gropes around in the dark, dragging his palm over the side of a ship as he squints up at the window in search of a moving shadow. It’s spooky here, so late at night and so quiet. So empty save for a monster watching with glowing eyes in the dark, and he doesn’t feel particularly comfortable with the tingles of warmth that this thought sends straight down to his groin.

No, oh no. Oh, Hell no.

He is  _ not _ getting riled up thinking about Keith jumping out at him. He is not going down that forbidden alien-tentacle-bondage-fantasy territory that he’d sworn to himself was only a materialization of his latent sexual frustration and fear. He isn’t getting off thinking about Keith’s weird, reflective eyes picking him out through a blanket of blackness. He isn’t positively vibrating with the need to be caught under the moist coils of Keith’s ungodly, rope-like arms, pinned down to the slick tile, ravished until he can’t tell up from down anymore.

He’s not going there right now.

He’s going to find Keith, he’s going to be the one doing the pinning. And he’s not going to let that bastard get away without a mindblowing orgasm tonight. He can’t lose here, not with so much at stake.

Like his own self-esteem. Like his own shaky pride as a lover who might be capable of filling Shiro’s shoes while he’s gone.

As the type of person who someone like Shiro would trust to take care of someone like Keith.

He just can’t let Shiro down now, and he won’t. He’s going to get through this, and he’s going to win.

Whether Keith likes it or not.

But privately, in the back of his mind, he reassures himself that Keith will like it very much, and he would never be the type of person to keep going if Keith  _ didn’t _ . But that’s not even what he was thinking about in the first place and he’s getting too distracted right now, when he should be looking for the slimy little mullet-headed bastard so he can get this show on the road.

He stumbles between two ships, struggling as his hand slips from the edge of one, until it finds the safety of the next. He can barely make out anything in here—can’t hear even the whisper of a breath, can’t smell Keith’s dumb, musky scent, can’t feel the ghost of warmth creeping up behind him.

Until a hand clasps firmly over his mouth, and a rough, stony arm wraps around his chest and pulls him back.

He yelps against the hand, his instincts kicking in as he attempts to flail his arms, kick his legs, do _ anything _ to free himself. His heart is a racket in his chest, his brain a rapid mantra of,  _ ‘It was a trap! That little fucker set me up! They’ve got me now, I’m done for!’ _

And as a last resort, he opens his mouth as wide as he can, dragging his tongue over the salty palm of his attacker.

Immediately, the hand pulls away, as does the arm, as the person behind him reels back and lets out a hiss of disgust and a long string of curses.

“Are you  _ serious _ ?!” It’s Keith’s voice. His adrenaline skids to a screeching halt. His cheeks pool with boiling, dizzying blood. “Why would you _ lick _ me, you asshole?! Who else would be grabbing you in here in the middle of the night?! I knew you’d cause a scene— _ God _ —that’s why I grabbed you, you idiot!”

Lance barks out a laugh, turning sharply in the general direction of Keith’s voice.

“Oh, you grabbed me by the _ mouth _ in the middle of the night in _ complete darkness  _ because you thought I’d  _ cause a scene _ ?! Have you ever heard of, you know, being a normal fucking person, Keith?! How hard would it have been to just call me over?!”

He can hear Keith stamp his foot more than he can see his shadow moving. He can only make out the faintest flicks of light narrowing, which he realizes, with a small rush of discomfort, are Keith’s eyes.

“Oh, because you’d definitely be able to find me just from my voice, right? Because you’re so good at navigating in the dark?”

Lance’s next words tumble out on their own, without the usual correspondence from his brain, that might warn him that saying such things might be a bad idea. And he regrets them immediately, as Keith goes instantly quiet, as the small embers of his eyes widen, dim and turn away.

“Not everyone is a freak who can see in the dark, Keith! That’s not normal!”

The silence is thicker than the darkness. For a moment, he wonders if he should just fumble his way towards the door and see himself back to his room for the night. He wonders how he managed to find a thing to say that could actually hurt Keith’s feelings—but he knows now, after all this time, that he’s always been able to.

It’s just, at this point in their relationship, Keith isn’t quite as good at hiding it.

“Look, Keith—” He grapples with an apology. He waves his hands in the air, but Keith still isn’t looking at him, as far as he can tell, and he can barely even make out his own movements. “I—I didn’t—”

“Are we going to do this or what? Or do you just wanna stand around in the dark all night?”

Always straight to the point. He wonders if he should allow Keith to brush this off so easily.

But he relents, because Keith is reaching forward and grasping him by the front of his shirt. He’s practically hauling him up the ladder of the closest ship and shoving him through the entryway.

And his mouth is hot, wet. His hands are rough and everywhere.

He’s pressing Lance against the armrest of the pilot’s seat. He’s pressing a knee firmly between his thighs.

Lance claws at him feebly, searching for skin. It’s even darker in the ship, and his shin connects painfully to the control panel as he struggles to gain some sort of footing.

“W-wait.” He pulls himself weakly away from Keith’s hungry lips. He can just make out the slightest hint of Keith’s eyes glowing back at him, wide and blown out, his pupils black pebbles in the dark. “Did… did you bring…?”

“The lube?” Keith practically laughs the words, pulling back and digging around noisily in his pockets. “Do you really think I’d forget it?”

Lance’s gulp is audible, hard and thick in his throat. He steadies himself on the arm of the chair, shaking as he slides down into the seat.

“Y-yeah,” he says weakly, “and—”

“The condoms?” Keith’s voice is gratingly smug. Lance grits his teeth as he listens to the sound of plastic crinkling a short ways away from his face. “I’m not an idiot, Lance.”

There’s a small stretch of silence, and Lance seizes this opportunity to perfect his plan. The tactics that he might use to win this night for himself, to prove to Keith, once and for all, that he isn’t some toy to be played with as he likes.

He has teeth of his own, and he isn’t afraid to use them. He has urges of his own, and demands that Keith had better start listening to if he ever wants to meet up like this again.

He works himself up to pounce, to argue, to fight for dominance.

Keith’s knee finds its way back between his legs.

“W—wait, wait, st-stop.”

Okay, that didn’t exactly start off smoothly, but Keith backs off nonetheless. He can practically  _ sense _ that dumb look of surprise on his stupid, handsome face.

“I… I want to try something different tonight.” Keith is quiet, unmoving. Lance pauses for a moment to drag in a breath, to pull himself up from the pilot’s seat. “I want to be in charge tonight. I want… to be the one who uses the condoms.”

It’s a ridiculously round-about way of saying that he wants to top, and he can tell that Keith is already rolling his eyes. The condoms crinkle and the lube in its bottle jostles about loudly as he crosses his arms over his chest.

And Lance doesn’t give him a chance to argue, because he knows that he won’t be able to talk his way out of this if Keith does. Because Keith isn’t good at talking, not even one bit, but he’s stubborn, and he’s bullheaded, and he once he digs his teeth into an idea, it’s impossible to detach him until he gets his way.

“Okay, okay, just listen! I wanna be in charge tonight, but if you hate it, we never have to do it again! Like, if I’m really bad at it and you don’t… c- _ cum _ … We can just call the whole thing off and finally know for sure that I suck at this and I need to just keep listening to you from now on, alright?”

He talks about it as though all of this is a game. As though it’s a challenge. It’s difficult not to smirk, even though he’s sure that Keith can see him.

But it’s too good, cornering him like this. Playing into all of his dumb ideas about never backing down from challenges and always proving to himself and everyone else that he’s the most capable guy for any job.

“...Fine.”

It’s as easy as that.

And right away, Lance is left with the realization that he never planned any further than this.

Awkwardly, he reaches blindly forward and places his hands on each of Keith’s arms. He swivels him around until he’s in the general direction of the pilot’s chair, but then he remembers their clothes. And he curses under his breath, his nerves rattling around in his brain and under his skin as he tears himself away and fiddles clumsily with the buttons on the front of his jacket.

Keith watches him for a moment, as though he’s really going to make him do everything. He can feel those hot eyes dragging over his skin, scrutinizing the way that he doesn’t manage to get the horrible thing open until far too much time has passed. How he bends down to tug helplessly at his bootlaces in the dark, muttering a flurry of curses under his breath.

But finally, after an agonizing moment in which he truly believes that he’s in this alone, he can hear Keith moving around, can feel the air displacing as he turns to set the condoms and the lube on the control panel before quietly undressing himself.

It’s a blessing, albeit one that Lance takes with much embarrassment. He can’t remember at first how Keith has managed to get both of them naked so effortlessly, until he finally recalls so many ugly bruises still fading on his neck, and the crescent marks of fingernails in his skin as his clothes were peeled away.

He doesn’t have the voracity that Keith has, the aggression, or the complete disregard for another cadet’s expensive uniform. He doesn’t know how far into himself he would need to reach to find that, nor is he too eager to become just another aggressive lover who Shiro will someday come home to.

But maybe this is enough. Maybe Keith won’t hold this little lull, right at the beginning, against him, if he manages to make the rest of the night good enough to make up for it.

He can feel Keith slipping past him just as he tugs off his other boot. He shimmies out of his pants just as he can see the fuzzy outline of Keith settling into the chair, as he listens nervously to the sound of a bottle uncapping and can’t see clearly enough to know exactly what Keith’s doing with it.

“Do you get off on this, cargo pilot?” Keith’s voice is a hard reality cutting through the dream of the quiet night. It’s crisp and clear, a knife through the hazy darkness. A prickle of need climbing straight down to his eagerly awakening cock, a small flare of anger in the depths of his chest. “Not being able to see me, when I can see you? Not knowing what I’m doing to myself right now?”

His words are punctuated with a curious squelch. And they’re breathy, heavy. They’re lilted and drawn out, softer than they were just moments ago.

“I know what you’re doing right now, you pervert,” Lance grumbles, “And I thought you agreed that I’d be in charge. Did I tell you that you could start touching yourself?”

The noises stop abruptly. He’ll swear, later on when he’s dreaming about this moment, that Keith let out a short, needy breath as he turned rounded eyes toward him.

“Yeah,” Lance says as he stands, shoving as much cockiness and authority into his voice as he can muster, “It’s gonna be like that,  _ cadet _ . You don’t touch yourself, you don’t make noise, you don’t even  _ cum _ unless I say so, got it?”

There’s no doubt about it, Keith gulps loudly. He sits straighter in his seat.

But he does so silently, obediently. Lance wonders if Shiro ever tried this before. He wonders if he’s ever seen this side of Keith, so eager to listen to demands.

Because it’s intoxicating, already. His head swims as all blood rushes south.

When he clambers over, he can see Keith’s pale thighs spread out wide. The lube bottle is a dark blob on his belly, a strand of condoms strewn in a black line over his chest. And he’s watching, with those bright eyes. If Lance focuses hard enough, he can see his ribs expanding as he draws in long, deep breaths.

And he reaches forward, before he can think too hard about it. Before his nerves can stop him. Keith’s skin is smooth and warm beneath his trembling hand, his belly rises with each staggered breath, the lights of his eyes narrowing into tiny slits as he tips his head back.

He’s shaking, ever-so slightly. Lance can hear the squeak of his fingers clawing into the armrests. And at first, he doesn’t understand why Keith’s fighting this so hard. He doesn’t know why it seems as though even the gentlest touch burns him.

But he can hear it, soon enough—the sound of those pitiful breaths sucked in through tightly-clasped lips. The groans bubbling up and dying in his throat.

He won’t make noise until Lance tells him to. This is all part of the game that he’s agreed to play.

This realization shoots straight down to his already straining erection.

He toys with this idea at first, leaning forward and planting the ghosts of kisses from Keith’s navel all the way up to his chest. He prods out his tongue, circling a perky nipple—taking it into his mouth with hollowed cheeks and sucking on it.

Keith arches his back, ripping his hand from the armrest and clasping it over his mouth. There are muffled noises slipping through his fingers—noises so much more lively and desperate than Lance has ever heard from him before.

So he bites down, naturally, to test it further. To push Keith until he doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore.

He can feel Keith’s erection bobbing in the empty air between them. He can feel his pulse skyrocketing through his veins, his shallow breaths puffing out between the gaps in his fingers.

And maybe feeling and not seeing really is the key to making this more exciting. Maybe it’s just Keith, always surprising him.

Or maybe it’s the mere idea that everything that happens tonight is completely within his control.

His words buzz against Keith’s sweat-dampened skin, “Don’t cover your mouth. I want to hear you.”

He doesn’t recognize his own voice—deep and gravelly, demanding. But Keith’s hand smacks back down to the armrest. His ankles lock around Lance’s waist and he rattles off a needy whine.

“P-please,” he huffs, “please, Lance…  _ touch _ me.”

He doesn’t touch him exactly how he’s asking, not right away. His fingers shake as he snatches the condoms from Keith’s chest. They peel off of the sweat, and he wonders, with a click of his tongue, why Keith would even think to bring so many.

He didn’t think…?

Lance shakes his head. There’s no way that he could survive more than one round with someone like Keith. He’d be dead, surely. He’d be too boneless and littered with marks to ever hope to attend class until Shiro returned from Kerberos.

He tears one off, dropping the rest to the floor between their feet. The plastic feels unpleasant between his teeth as he rips it open, ignoring Keith’s quiet warning to be careful, or  _ “using a condom will be completely useless anyway” _ .

After fumbling to roll the stupid thing over the length of his erection, he reaches forward and grabs the lube from Keith’s belly, wondering where those sneaky hands might have lathered it earlier. He bumps Keith’s cock with the back of his hand as he pulls the bottle away, watching the black blob of it swaying back and forth, reveling in the lack of any stickiness that he might have expected to find there.

So… he was playing with himself further down.

For a hitched breath of a moment, Lance’s resolve trembles.

He busies himself with uncapping the bottle, swallowing down his anxiety. It’s cold when he drizzles it over his skin, even through the condom, and he realizes regretfully why Keith and Shiro must have always made a point of pouring it into their palms first.

The bottle is re-capped, he tosses it precariously into the dark. And he pumps, slowly and carefully, avoiding and sensitive spots that might push him over the edge too soon.

Keith watches him with the hooded edges of reflective eyes. He’s breathing so hard now that the sound of it bounces off of the walls around them. It’s a tidal wave of Keith’s need. It’s a roaring round of applause for Lance, for actually pushing himself this far.

He pulls his hand away from himself, grasping Keith’s cock loosely at the base. He buries his flaming cheeks in the hollow of Keith’s collarbone, biting down. And he drinks in those feeble moans, the trembles, the arching of Keith’s waifish body into his own—warm and soft and so _ real  _ against him. So vulnerable and unguarded, just for him.

Keith’s moans hitch to a higher octave, and that’s when he knows to pull away. When it’s getting too close to end so soon. Keith lets out a small whine, but he doesn’t move to stop him. Lance can imagine his tight, white knuckles scratching marks into the leather armrests. He can imagine the curious purple swelling at the head of his dick. He can imagine how blown out his pupils are, how pink his lips look, the darkening dots of bite marks littering his neck.

And he prods, at first, at the spot just between his cheeks. He finds that place easily, as though even blindly, his body might understand where to find the place that will forever tether him to someone like Keith.

Because this is the first time, for both of them. The first time that he’s ever seen someone inside of Keith, or been the person inside of him. And the first time that Keith has ever trusted him enough to allow this.

His fingers find that place too, as a second thought. Keith isn’t complaining or warning him. If anything, he’s urging him forward with his ankles, but he wants to be sure. He wants this to hurt as little as possible, because he still doesn’t know how Keith feels about pain.

And it’s warm inside of Keith. It’s nothing like he could have imagined. His head swims, vertigo setting in as the world tips off-balance, as his cock twitches painfully and every nerve in his body catches fire. Keith watches him with heavy eyes, with baited breath.

They both moan, needy.

His fingers slip away, and he prods again. He slips the tip inside, and he can hear the scrape of Keith’s fingers tight against the armrest. He wonders, lightheaded, how it will look in the morning. If the other pilots will wonder what happened when they come in to practice and find the chair torn to bits.

It’s warm and tight, inside of Keith. It swallows him up, springs dots of light before his eyes. He feels this in every pore of his body, the hum of pleasure, the overflow of emotion that itches at the corners of his eyes.

And Keith is kissing him, dragging him downward by the hair, crashing their mouths together with an awkward clash of teeth, and a tongue on the roof of his mouth, hot lips sucking hard until he’s rocking his hips harder and harder, faster and with more purpose.

Keith’s kissing him so hard that it hurts—swallowing up all of the embarrassing confessions that blossom in his brain, the  _ ‘I love you’ _ s, the  _ ‘I need you’ _ s, the  _ ‘Please don’t ever leave me’ _ s that he knows would just kill the mood.

And Keith pulls away, his head smacking against the headrest, his hips jamming down against Lance just out of time with his thrusts.

“P-please,” he cries, the blur of his hand a quick shadow between them, as he pumps himself clumsily, “c-can I—can I cum?”

It’s enough to push Lance over the edge. It’s enough that his strangled _ ‘yes’ _ is barely coherent. But Keith unfolds beneath him—whining long and low, threading the fingers of his free hand tight in Lance’s hair, pulling just at the nape of his neck to draw him nearer.

The blur fades into a light buzz. He falls slack against Keith for many, many heartbeats.

Eventually, they slide close together, a tangled mess of limbs wrapped around each other on the chair. He’s biting out the last of his heavy, scattered breaths against Keith’s neck, whispering incomprehensible nonsense that he hopes Keith has the good sense to ignore.

Keith pulls himself up, as though he’s going to leave. As though everything is done now and there’s no reason for him to stick around.

“Keith—” his voice sounds pitiful even in his own ears, even in the slowly-fading afterglow of another Earth-shattering orgasm. “Where are you—”

He can hear Keith moving around in the darkness, but he’s too far away to make out. There’s the sound of the lube scooped up from the floor, placed somewhere far off to his left that must be the control panel. He can hear the jingle of a belt loose in a pair of pants, the scrape of fabric lifted from the floor. His senses are hyper focused on all of this, his heart tittering in his chest as he awaits the moment that Keith will light himself a cigarette and leave him here alone, in the dark.

He listens to those footsteps, the tap of boots lifted and set back down, further away, the click of Keith’s tongue and the plastic crinkling of the condoms as he picks them up just near the foot of the pilot’s chair.

He listens to all of this, with baited breath. He wonders if he should get up and start getting dressed too, if it was really too much to ask of someone like Keith to stick around after passing such a huge milestone in their relationship.

But Keith returns, moments later, draping something big and warm over both of them. He presses a soft kiss against Lance’s forehead, squeezing in next to him and wriggling around to find a comfortable spot on the chair again.

“Don’t worry,” he practically whispers, his words so timid and small that Lance almost doesn’t recognize them, “I’m not going anywhere.”

_ “I’m not going to leave you.” _

And slowly, before Lance even notices it at all, they drift to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, happy Thursday! So, as I mentioned on Tuesday, this chapter is actually the last one that I wrote, with the weird order that I decided to write these in. I believe it was something like… One through fourteen, then twenty-four to twenty-eight… Thirty, twenty-nine… then these last two. Did I do that right? Is that all of them? Haha!
> 
> Anyway, this chapter name is actually taken from one of the songs on the playlist that I listened to while I was writing this story. It’s my favorite song from that playlist, that I think I might have listened to the most. It’s called [‘Silhouettes of You’ by Isaac Gracie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-DOZ4XsMq0), and it honestly does not suit this particular chapter at all! But it’s beautiful, nonetheless. (and the song that’s sort of become, maybe… the one that I associate with this story the most)
> 
> So next week is the last extra chapter. I hope you guys are excited, and I also hope that you guys have a safe and happy new year! [I’ll see you again in 2018!](https://curionabang.tumblr.com/post/169029267473/more-so-i-dont-really-know-how-to-go-about)


	24. Into the Mouth of the Wolf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A pilot error. All crew pronounced dead.

When Lance awakens in the morning, it takes him awhile to realize that he isn’t in his room.

He’s not even sleeping in a bed.

It’s dark in here—wherever he is—and deathly quiet. He’s wrapped in what he thinks, at first, might be a small, misshapen blanket, until his eyes adjust to the darkness and he pulls it away from him, realizing with a thick gulp and color rising to his cheeks that it’s Keith’s uniform jacket.

And gradually, the memories come rushing back to him, and the pain tingling against his neck finally begins to make sense.

He rubs the sleep from his eyes, gathers his clothes from the floor and gets dressed. He looks around the practice ship, wondering what time it is, hoping that it isn’t late enough in the day that anyone might catch him on his way back upstairs.

Keith’s class should be starting to fly these soon, if they haven’t already. He’s sure, realizing with much surprise that the bitterness that he expects to feel just isn’t there anymore, that Keith will blow every other student out of the water.

By this time next year, he’s positive that Keith’s name will be at the top of the Garrison’s list of potential pilots for some new mission, and eventually, it will be Shiro sneaking around with him instead, filling up the empty holes in his heart that Keith left behind.

With a sigh, he gathers Keith’s jacket and steps out of the ship. He closes the door behind him and makes his way out into the hall, walks quietly and carefully and ducks for cover every time that he hears anything too suspicious.

He tries not to get too distracted, thinking about the last time that he sneaked around down here like this. He tries to think straight enough that he might be able to formulate a coherent excuse if he happens to get caught.

But when he finally makes his way to the top of the staircase and ventures out into the busy halls, there’s a strange, oppressive silence hanging pregnant in the air. No one speaks, their heads are low. It’s surreal in its dreariness, in the profound absence of the usual hustle and bustle that he would expect from a regular day at the Galaxy Garrison.

There’s the crackle just before the morning announcements—a harsh grating of dust particles lodged somewhere in all of the gnarled wires and decade-old speakers that he’s barely familiar with when it isn’t the perpetual white noise far below so much chatter.

And he hears it, suddenly—like the white-hot crack of a whip. Like Keith’s bony knuckles jabbed sharply into his cheekbones.

Loud and clear, in an unwavering voice that seems misplaced here, in this moment. With no sadness or no remorse, like a robot. Like the soulless drones that he always suspected of the Galaxy Garrison’s higher ups.

Commander Iverson speaks monotonously, as though he’s going over the weather.

_ “The Kerberos Mission was a failure.” _

_ “Unknown pilot error.” _

_ “All crew pronounced dead.” _

 

* * *

 

It’s simple math.

The Galaxy Garrison minus Takashi Shirogane, plus Keith Kogane—useless as always and completely helpless to save him—equals absolutely no reason for Keith to stay here anymore.

It means no more boot-licking and no more flight simulator. It means that he can stop filling out all of the paperwork required for this Godforsaken place to stop asking him to update an emergency contact because no one’s left to care if he disappears anymore.

It means that he can pack his things and go—that he can stop putting on this pointless facade of some moron who thinks that he can amount to anything but the same gutter trash that he came from, but the same shithole that curdled him and pushed him out into a big, unforgiving world.

It means that he has nothing to say to Lance when he hears him banging on his dorm room door. That he can sit in silence on his bed, ignoring the way that his fists tremble desperately against his knees, how his heart pounds so hard in his chest that he can barely even breathe.

And it means that even when he relents—even when half an hour passes and he can still hear Lance’s heavy breathing out there, and his pitiful little whimpers and cries, that he can open the door and stare up at Lance’s red-rimmed, glassy eyes without allowing all of his ugly emotions to seep through the iron-clad mask of his perfectly manicured expression.

It hurts to look at Lance, a lot more than he would have expected. It pangs something deep and hollow in the furthest recesses of his chest, fills him up with hot water that threatens to spill out of the corners of his eyes.

He’s boiling here, watching Lance sniffle.

He’s burning everywhere. His tongue is lodged so far into the back of his sandpapery throat that the both of them stand in silence for what feels like a millennia.

Lance tries to tell him not to do anything stupid, and he asks Lance, so much louder than he means to, _ “What the fuck does it matter to you what I do?” _

Lance pushes his way into his room—in the same way that he’s barged in and trampled all over everything in Keith’s life. He’s wearing wrinkled clothes and his hair is standing up in all directions. His boots are are only barely clean enough to pass inspection, and Keith is painfully aware of the skid marks that they’re leaving on the otherwise glossy, meticulously clean surface of his bedroom floor.

And he’s angry, because that’s what he does. He doesn’t cry about these things like Lance does. He doesn’t bottle it all up inside and allow it to fester like Shiro. He rages, he fights. He keeps fueling himself with this tumor of hatred growing so hot and so swollen deep inside of him that he isn’t sure how much longer he can take it.

Which part of him is the “real” him? Is it the uncontrollable anger? Is it the feeble little voice in his heart that keeps telling him that none of this is Lance’s fault? Is it that terrible reason echoing in the background of his staticky thoughts that keeps urging him to remove himself from this situation before he pushes too hard and does something that someday, he might regret?

Is he the unruly monster of a child who was never fit for leaving the oppressive prison bars of that orphanage, or the man who Shiro thought he was leaving behind on Earth?

He chooses to be the monster, because it’s easier, of course, and Lance needs to leave before he gets hurt too.

Like his mother, and his dad. Like Shiro. Like everyone else who was ever stupid enough to reach out to him.

His thoughts swirl around in his head. His heart clatters in his chest.

His entire body is lit up with electricity—his hands shake, his head is pounding.

He shoves Lance away.

“Just fuck off, Lance, okay?! It’s over!”

That horrible little voice inside of him pleads, _ “Don’t do this, you love him.” _

“I ruin everything, and I’m just gonna ruin you too!”

_ “Don’t leave me, please. I’m so scared of being alone again.” _

“Shiro’s not coming back, Lance! So what the fuck is even the point of pretending that we can stand each other anymore?!”

_ “I love you, please.” _

Lance reels back like he’s been burned, and the ugly creature living inside of him smiles. The part of him that hates his own happiness stretches out and soaks this in, it tells him that he deserves this. It tells him that Lance deserves it too for trusting him.

He tells himself that it’s better this way—that this is one of those hard lessons in life that Lance is going to need to learn someday anyway.

_ “Don’t love an unlovable person” _ ,  _ “Don’t ever fool yourself into thinking that you can fix someone.” _

Lance should be thanking him for this.

Lance should realize that the only good thing about Keith was Shiro, and himself—that those things are dead and buried. That there’s nothing left here but a dangerous person who will drag the whole world down with him if he can.

He’s a black hole.

He’s an empty husk.

He’s nothing without Shiro.

His mind blanks.

He’s all fire in his limbs and hot air in his lungs. He’s pushing past Lance and leaving him behind, owl-eyed, in his bedroom. He’s bolting down the hall and shoving through groups of mourning students.

The announcements overhead are an incoherent mumble. The fearful eyes watching him feel like a hundred tiny needles in his skin.

He’s a father leaving his young child alone in the middle of the night. He’s a mother who won’t stick around even long enough to hear her kid learn her name. He’s a pilot shooting off into the black gaps between the stars—exploding like a supernova so far away that none of his loved ones will live long enough to see the final echoes of his residual light.

He’s a monster of a boy and a lonely, pathetic man.

Running from his problems, from his lovers, from everything in his life.

The voice inside of him tells him that everyone else can see it too—that he’s hurt someone, that he’s messed up. He’s cracked himself open and bared all of his ugly insides. They’re disgusted by his sadness, by his weakness. They’re finally starting to realize that allowing someone like Keith Kogane to roam their halls was a mistake.

_ “We should have known,” _ is what they’re whispering, surely,  _ “Takashi Shirogane should have never been trusted as a pilot if he was stupid enough to befriend someone like Keith.” _

He doesn’t stop running until he reaches the front gates.

The sun sits high above him in the sky. Somewhere far beyond it, Shiro floats in an endless, unmarked grave.

He’s on his knees and he’s screaming—pounding his fists into the unforgiving, sweltering ground until they’re red and raw. Until he can’t feel his arms all the way up into his elbows and the sand sears his knees through the fabric of his pants.

He thinks about Lance, about the Galaxy Garrison, about the flight simulator and his roommate. He thinks about Lance’s weird friend, about watching drills from the rooftop, about smoking in the practice ships and sneaking away late at night.

He wonders how many things he would be willing to lose, just to have Shiro back again.

He wonders how low his odds of winning in that sort of gamble would need to be before he wouldn’t let himself try.

He wonders if his life is worth anything without this place, without his lovers, without a cause to die for.

And he doesn’t know.

No matter how long he sits outside in the heat, boiling in his rage and his festering sadness beneath the mid-afternoon sun, he never manages to figure it out.

Lance will forgive him if he apologizes, he knows.

But it’s better this way.

Because he’s going to do something reckless, just like he always does. He’s going to burn himself up looking for answers. He’s going to get to the bottom of this.

 

_ “Pilot Error” _ .

 

He knows better than that.

He’s a useless, deplorable fool, but even  _ he _ knows better than that.

And in time, if he can do everything right, just this once, so will everyone else.

 

* * *

 

Lance doesn’t hear from Keith for the rest of the day.

He’d stuck around in his dorm room until Keith’s roommate had finally shown up. The guy hadn’t said much of anything to him—only greeted him with a small hello and a jerky, nervous nod—before tucking himself into the chair under the desk and opening one of his workbooks.

Lance had wanted to go through Keith’s things. He couldn’t describe it at the time. He couldn’t find a good enough reason to snoop. He didn’t understand why he’d suddenly felt that way—as though the missing puzzle piece might have existed somewhere among Keith’s few belongings and finding it was the only way to mend all of this.

His sticky fingers had only been abated by the other guy in the room. And even now, hours later, he feels as though he should have just looked around anyway.

He isn’t even sure what he’d expected to find.

A secret love letter? A map to finding Shiro’s corpse somewhere in the sky?

He curses quietly, under his breath—leans as far over the edge of the roof as his body allows before the vertigo sets in. He wishes that he’d picked up smoking now, that he had something—anything—to help calm his nerves.

He wishes that he could talk to Keith.

And he thinks about what Shiro might have been thinking about, when everything happened so fast. He imagines how the simulator jolts, how he still feels that tremor of turbulence and allows himself to be jostled by it. He thinks about failing, about trying too hard. About getting so stuck in his own head that he can’t make his hands move against the controls fast enough.

He thinks about all of the fictional cargo that he’s lost in those simulations. He thinks about how Keith never loses more than one or two points.

And he tries to think of what Shiro must have been thinking too, in that moment. What distracted him, what captured his attention so fully that he couldn’t even focus on keeping everyone alive.

A pilot error, that’s what they’d said.

It doesn’t cross his mind until much, much later that maybe they’d lied.

For now, he can’t think of a single thing that might make him feel better about any of this.

He’s never known anyone who’s died before. He’s never known anyone who was affected by another person’s death.

Not up close, at least. Not personally. He’s heard the stories of his great grandmother who passed away before he was born, of many old relatives who feel more like dusty old stories that living, breathing people. He’s read about important people in history, about the men who discovered America. About the pilots who first pushed off from the ground and soared in the sky.

And he knows that a lot of those people are dead now. In a technical, literary sense, he can mourn the deaths of those long-passed, cope with the loss of those firsthand stories that he’ll never get to hear.

But Shiro isn’t a hundred year old great aunt or the fuzzy photo of a man in a textbook. He isn’t a statue in the park or a name engraved on a boat.

He was just here a few months ago—living, breathing, in the flesh.

He was warm and he was soft. He was kind and comforting.

He was real.

And Lance can’t tell himself that maybe it was painless or fearless, that maybe he slipped away comfortably in dreams. He can’t tell himself that Shiro is in a better place, because he isn’t even sure where he is.

He’s just lost out there, somewhere far off in the sky. He’s pressed like dead flowers between the crisp pages of Lance’s life—stowed away, petrified, and never allowed to grow older than twenty-five.

Lance doesn’t know what it feels like to peer down at a person, preserved in their casket. He’s never witnessed the candlelight vigils or the prayer groups that still have yet to come. Keith won’t ever see them, but he doesn’t know that now.

Keith will slip away quietly in the night, in Lance’s dreams. He’ll dissipate like smoke—silently, brutally—as the Garrison does everything in their power to cover up the smell that he leaves behind.

He thinks, in this moment, that Shiro dying might be the worst thing that could ever happen to him.

And looking back, he’ll feel so stupid, so childish, for not realizing that he was wrong.

For now, he concentrates on the setting sun, tries to remind himself what it must have felt like to be sandwiched between Keith and Shiro out here. He imagines the heavy warmth of Shiro’s arm slung around his shoulders, thinks about Keith’s bubbling laughter, about that specific kind of scowl that he’d wear when he was trying desperately not to smile.

He thinks about how it must have felt to think that the whole world was right in front of him, that his fingers were wrapping slowly around it, that he had nothing but time.

That they’d be together forever.

That Shiro would never die, and Keith would never hate him again.

He doesn’t know how long it takes before he starts crying. He can’t exactly pinpoint the moment between when he was sitting here quietly, and when he’d dropped weakly to the ground. He feels the gritty scrape of the concrete against his palms and knees, the white hot burn of tears on his cheeks. His throat constricts, his heart pounds furiously in his chest.

He presses his forehead against the unyielding metal of the roof ledge.

And he imagines that it’s Shiro’s hard chest. That somehow, in some other universe, Shiro never left him, and he’s comforting him now.

But thinking about Shiro being here only reminds him that Shiro will never be here ever again.

It reminds him that he might only ever meet Shiro’s mother at his funeral, that he’ll never get to bring him home to meet his family, that they’ll never get to bring Keith to that shitty bed and breakfast and introduce him to Bojangles.

It reminds him of all of the wide gaps in their relationship—of all of the things that they’ve never done and should have, of all of the time that they wasted tiptoeing around what they really wanted, instead of spending that precious time doing anything important.

He can’t think of a single thing that might make him feel okay right now.

Except for Keith.

But Keith, like Shiro, feels like a faraway dream. Like maybe, somehow, nothing will ever be the same between them again.

He’s right about something today, at least.

He doesn’t know it yet, and even when he does, it still won’t make him feel any better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, so, uh… I hope you guys had a happy new year! I wanted to take a moment to talk about this chapter title, because it’s one of my favorite phrases! The meaning of it, and the general vibe… Everything about it is pretty neat!
> 
> So “Into the Mouth of the Wolf” is the translation of an Italian theater-related idiom. “In bocca al lupo” is basically like telling someone “break a leg!” before they go onstage. Which is fueled by, you know… the idea that wishing someone good luck is considered superstitiously bad in theater, so… just tell your buddy to go hop in some wolf mouths next time that you want them to do a good job!
> 
> Anyway, I really appreciate you guys sticking around through all of this! See you again Thursday!


	25. Many Drops Make a Flood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hunk tries and fails, again and again.

_ Home is where the heart is. _

_ Home is where the heart gets lost in your eyes. _

_ Home is where the monsters sleeping deep inside of you sprouted legs and dragged you somewhere far, far away, forever. _

_ Home is where I’d run to, if I knew where you’d gone. _

_ Home is a four letter word, and the nicest one in the long list of things that I’d like to call you right now. _

Lance is writing a love letter.

Or maybe, it’s some kind of threat.

He’d asked Hunk earlier about invisible ink. He’d asked one of his professors about learning a code language. He’d conjured up a fantasy inside of his brain—where he’s somehow smart enough or crafty enough to find a way to send a message out to Keith.

With smoke rings in the sky, or a letter tied to a pigeon’s leg.

Or a message in a bottle, thrust out into the nonexistent sea.

Something romantic, something dramatic.

Something big and loud and  _ forceful  _ enough that Keith couldn’t ignore the tremors of it crawling through the desert sand around him.

It’s been a week since the announcement of Shiro’s death sent shockwaves through the Galaxy Garrison. It’s been seven days, one hundred and sixty-eight hours. It’s been a slow, agonizing lurch of time. It’s been the longest silence of Lance’s life.

The school, for awhile, was dead and quiet. Everyone seemed too afraid to speak. They’d hung photos of Shiro and the other pilots on the wall just outside of the rec room. They’d held a candlelight vigil—but the commanders denied the use of lighters in the building, and whichever sorry sucker had taken Shiro’s place as their go-to lackey had been forced to make the long trip into town to pick up plastic candles with little lights inside.

Lance hadn’t stayed for long, but when he’d thought about the bashful way that Shiro might have laughed at all of them—how he’d make some quiet joke about how silly it looked, how he’d tell Lance, _ “They can’t even bring themselves to be nice enough to allow these people to mourn properly” _ —for a moment, everything had felt okay.

For a moment, it had almost felt as though Shiro was hovering somewhere close behind him—placing a big, warm hand on his shoulder. Filling up the dreadful cracks of silence all around them with his musical laughter.

Keith hadn’t shown up to the vigil at all, but it hadn’t been surprising. Since the news dropped about Kerberos, Lance hadn’t seen more of him than a whisper of those dark curls in the hallway, the slam of his door when he ventured anywhere near his dorm, the slightest murmurs of his absence during all of the vigils and crisis therapy sessions that everyone seemed to think that he was obligated to be a part of. He’d stopped attending classes altogether—stopped meeting with Lance in the library at the end of the day. Lance could never catch him in the cafeteria or the locker room, and every time that he’d garnered the courage to go to his room to find him, no one had answered the door.

He’d been stupid enough to tell himself that maybe Keith would come around with time. He’d been foolish enough to think that maybe Keith loved him enough that he’d overcome this. That he’d reach out once things got too hard to handle on his own, and he’d remember—no matter how much Shiro’s absence hurt, no matter how alone he might have felt—that Lance would always be there at the end of the day, knocking on the door.

That Lance would always find the time to be there for him, and to hold his hand as the two of them navigated through the winding paths of loss and lonely agony together.

But one afternoon, four days after they’d announced the Kerberos failure—ninety-six miserable hours spent fretting over Keith’s growing absences in class, his empty seat in the library, the glaring hole that he’d left right in the center of Lance’s life—he’d stopped by his room after class to drop off his books.

He’d promised Hunk that the two of them would study together. He’d spent the entire day reasoning with himself that it wasn’t “cheating” on Keith or betraying him. That if Keith wanted to stick around, he’d do it, and filling his empty seat in the library with another body wasn’t doing him any disservice when he obviously didn’t want to be there anyway.

And he still isn’t sure what had possessed him to check the desk before he left. Fate, perhaps—some kind of silent force of the universe drawing him toward the final remnants of Keith—of his old, happy life. Of the comfort and contentment that he was just starting to get used to before it all shattered around him.

On the desk, between the piles of cluttered papers and Hunk’s cookbooks, he’d noticed the glint of it in the light first.

He’d wondered if Hunk had left some bolts out again. He’d wondered if he was delirious with stress and exhaustion and if his mind was suddenly playing tricks on him.

But it was cold when he pressed his fingers against it. It was heavy and smooth in his hands.

He still doesn’t know how Keith managed to get into his room.

But it was a very clear sign—a bold, glaring statement: the lighter that he’d given Keith. The one with the silly inscription.

He’d pocketed it without really thinking.

And he’s still too terrified to consider how all of this makes him feel.

A week bled into two, into a month and a half, into three months, then four. He’d been sleepwalking through life, through class, through every meaningless interaction and every hollow relationship with everyone around him.

He’d started to feel as though he was a tombstone—an effigy to Keith and Shiro’s very existence. He hadn’t offered a reaction when Iverson stopped by their class and announced that Keith had been expelled.

He’d accepted the offer to move on to fighter class. He’d reminded himself, as he’d stood stiffly in front of everyone and shook Iverson’s hand, of Keith on the very first day, in the flight simulator. He’d finally understood what Keith must have been feeling then.

Or, at the very least, he’d understood what it had felt like to feel nothing at all.

He’d wanted nothing more than to be happy, to boast. He’d wanted to make a cocky joke and maybe even to rub it into the faces of everyone who had doubted him before.

But Iverson’s hand had felt like stone against his palm. If it was warm, he didn’t notice. It felt like desert sand. It felt like Keith’s bones cracking against his fist. It felt like the unyielding surface of Keith’s dorm room door.

It felt like heavy lead—like the lighter in his pocket, forever weighing him down to the ground.

And he’d settled into Keith’s place, sunk gracelessly into his former skin. He’d wrapped himself in the position of “fighter pilot” like a security blanket, and for a while, everything was okay.

He was assigned a team in his new position, and he’d never realized that Keith must have had one of his own. He’d realized, so belatedly, that he’d never asked Keith much of anything about his program, about his normal day-to-day, about the sorts of things and the kinds of people that he must have woken up every day and faced, without ever mentioning it when they were alone.

He isn’t sure how he feels about that either—he hadn’t back then, and he still doesn’t now. Now, as he leans far over the ledge of the roof, as he flicks the lighter on and off.

As he stands here, all alone, where he once cuddled up between both Shiro and Keith. He can feel their ghosts here, if he really focuses hard enough. He can feel the cold tendrils of memories rustling through the air. He can hear Keith’s strange, bubbly laughter, he can feel Shiro’s big fingers in his hair.

He can almost imagine the way that Keith might look at him right now, how he’d say, so gruff and so emotionless and so absolutely tactless,  _ “You just made fighter pilot, just like you always wanted, right? So what the Hell are you acting so pouty about?” _

_ Because you’re not here anymore. _

_ Because Shiro’s dead. _

_ I didn’t want any of these things if it meant that I’d have to lose both of you. _

_ I didn’t want any of this if it meant that I’d have to be alone again. _

Hunk has made mini-cupcakes in celebration when Lance goes back to his room. “Congratulations” is spelled out, one letter at a time, in multi-color icing atop each one.

And he smiles, of course, because Hunk is always so kind.

But he eats them, and he tastes nothing.

He feels nothing.

And he thinks, deep down, even through his stupid, fake grin and all of the meaningless jokes—

He is nothing, anymore.

 

* * *

 

“Do you believe in heaven, Hunk? Or like… some kind of afterlife?”

They’re sitting together on their dorm room floor, sharing plates of keke fa'i as Hunk tinkers with the clock radio that he’s trying to force to broadcast more than the dinky little radio station from town.

They only ever want to talk about Baseball anyway, and Lance has made it abundantly clear that he has no interest in sports whatsoever.

It’s a loaded question that Hunk isn’t entirely sure if he should be answering seriously or not. He’s never thought about it much—not since he was a little kid—and he’s fairly certain that Lance is only asking because he’s determined to keep drowning in a certain level of self-pity that’s growing increasingly more and more unhealthy as the days go on.

At this point, with a small glance at the calendar hanging behind their shared desk, he realizes that it’s been six months. Six months since the Kerberos mission’s failure. Six months since Keith ran away, or got expelled, or whatever inane theory that Lance has decided to claim about the whole thing today.

“Lance—” he starts to chide, but Lance cuts him off through a cheekful of cake.

“It’s just a question, Hunk!” he spits crumbs all over the front of his shirt, as he wags his fork around in the air. “Not everything has to have some deeper meaning, okay? I’m just making conversation.”

He bites his lip, opting to drag his fork around in his cake for a moment, instead of answering. The radio is sputtering a mixture of three different stations at once—staticky and nearly incoherent, but still, making progress. He ignores it in favor of mulling over Lance’s question, and weighing the pros and cons of humoring him just this once, just for tonight.

“Well, I guess it kind of depends on what you believe in, right? I mean, my mom always said that we have to live on somehow, but we didn’t really talk about it more than that…”

This isn’t his forte, and frankly, he isn’t entirely comfortable facing his mortality over delicious cake at six in the evening on a school night. He doesn’t like thinking about dying, or living through someone else’s death.

He doesn’t like to imagine how he would feel in Lance’s shoes right now, and he realizes, guiltily, that he’s not being very fair here at all.

He can’t imagine what it must feel like for Lance—to lose two important people, one after another. To live in the skeleton of the life that they both once lived, to wake up each morning and fill the space of Keith’s absence, to work toward the very same goal that inevitably killed Shiro.

He doesn’t think that he’d still be enlisted. He doesn’t think that he could stomach any of this with even an ounce of the same bravery or strength as Lance has so far.

But he knows better than to tell Lance any of this. He knows that the only thing worse to Lance right now than pity is telling him that he’s being strong. Than the condescension that comes with that sort of compliment.

_ “Look at you, so strong when your entire life is in shambles.” _

But even still, he wishes that he knew what to say. He wishes that there was some magic word that might make all of this okay.

“I bet heaven is just… reliving all of the best times over and over again.” It’s not particularly eloquent, but it’s all that he can think to say. “Like… I bet, for Shiro, he’s just reliving the moment that he met you and Keith over and over again. And I bet he’s really happy with that, dude. Just like… all of those good memories that you guys made together—I bet that’s heaven for Shiro.”

Lance watches him for a long time after that—reading his expression, chewing his food so many times that Hunk is sure that it’s nothing but mush in his mouth by now. Eventually, he flicks his gaze downward, setting his fork on his plate and his plate on the floor between his socked feet. His shoulders sag and shake. He’s biting his lip, drawing his brows together low and tight.

His voice is so quiet under the static and the radio chatter. It’s a small, pitiful thing—clipped and heavy and wet.

“He  _ left  _ me, Hunk… How could it have been that good if he still left?”

He’s by Lance’s side in record time, ignoring the way that his own plate clatters as it falls—ignoring the skittering of the radio and the clumsy way that his socks slide against the floor in his haste. Immediately, he wraps his arms around Lance’s shoulders, and Lance lets him, effortlessly, without any stupid jokes, without any fight at all.

“It was an accident, Lance,” he murmurs, combing his fingers through Lance’s hair, closing his eyes tight against the sound of those tell-tale hiccups and the catching of Lance’s breath in his throat, “He didn’t leave you—he-he wouldn’t have left you like that if he’d known.”

He can feel the wetness of Lance’s tears against his sleeve. He can feel the quaking of everything within Lance working its way out. Like a tiny hurricane, like the beginning tremors of an earthquake vibrating through the earth. He holds Lance only tighter, feeling so useless and small.

Feeling like the worst friend in the universe, again and again.

He’d checked out a self-help book from the library, about moving on after the death of a loved one. He’d subtly started cooking every comfort-food that he knows. He’d taken many opportunities to suggest counseling, to talk about how Lance must be feeling, to help him move on.

But he’s helpless now, as Lance cries and cries. As he reaches out for something that Hunk could never possibly hope to give him.

And deep in his heart, in a shameful place so far beyond his sadness and his insecurity, beyond his overwhelming need to help Lance through this and his undying devotion to his dearest friend—

Deep down, he hates Keith for leaving.

He hates him more than he’s ever hated anyone in his life.

“I miss them, Hunk,” Lance croaks, “I miss them so much, I wish I was dead.”

He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what to do.

It’s just himself and Lance, alone in their small room. Alone in an ocean of endless faces, tucked away in the small quiet among so many other students—among so many people who have moved on from the tragedy that’s effortlessly halted Lance’s entire life.

He doesn’t know what to say, so he only holds Lance closer.

And he knows that Lance could never hate Keith. He knows that Lance would judge him if he knew exactly what he’s feeling right now. If he knew that Hunk would like a shot at punching Keith in the face now too, if he knew that Hunk would love nothing more than to venture out into the unforgiving desert and drag the little bastard back here, kicking and screaming, just so he could force him to explain himself and apologize.

And he knows that he’ll always be too chickenshit to ever actually do any of that. That he’d bite his lip and step back if he ever saw Keith again.

He knows that he’ll never be the friend that Lance deserves—the one who will do anything for him, just like Lance would do anything for  _ him _ .

And he knows that all that he can do right now is hold Lance until his tears subside and his shaking stills, and his breath evens out so smoothly that he might have fallen asleep.

There’s nothing left for either of them here, but going through the motions. There’s nothing but paranoia and doubt—but the sneaking suspicion that the Galaxy Garrison is hiding something, that maybe Keith knew it, and that’s why he’s disappeared without a trace.

There’s nothing here but ghosts and whispers, but the shadow of a life that Lance once lived.

There’s nothing here but a sputtering radio and spilled keke fa'i on the floor. Nothing but Lance’s shuddering body in his arms, and Hunk’s flickering anger.

And he knows that digging deeper into the conspiracies surrounding Shiro’s disappearance won’t bring him back. He knows that searching for Keith won’t undo the terrible way that he left Lance behind. He knows that dwelling on these things will only make them grow bigger, will only monument them in both of their lives. It’ll only stall the healing process and take away their power. It’ll only make them slaves to the bad things that happened to them, until there’s nothing left of them but every tragedy that they’ve endured.

He understands that allowing Lance to continue festering in his sadness won’t do him any good. Humoring him will only hurt him more in the end.

Finding answers won’t make any of this okay.

But maybe, at the very least, everything will finally make sense.

What happens to a person after they die?

Where does the soul go in the afterlife?

At the very least, Hunk hopes and he prays that nothing after death hurts as much as Lance is hurting right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter… is my beta’s least favorite. They told me, “Moth. Moth E. Flyer… I do not like this chapter. It hurts me.”
> 
> So, honestly… I’m sorry. This is the very final chapter of my winter special, so I’ll be back to posting only on Thursdays next week. And I kinda feel like I left this off in a mean place. 
> 
> Ah, well… thank you so much for reading anyway! I’ll see you guys next Thursday!


	26. Love is Not Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We carry those who love us everywhere, even out in space.

When Shiro used to contemplate the sounds that he would someday hear in the deepest recesses of space, he might have pondered the idea that sound itself was highly unlikely beyond the scratch of the radio within his helmet and the huff of his breath fogging the window of his spacesuit.

He might have told himself that it would be deadly quiet. That it would be the heaviest silence that had ever pressed against his eardrums.

He might have wondered back then, if he’d feel terrified or invigorated—kept company only by the sound of his own thoughts. Left with the silence and only his own inner demons echoing in his mind.

And he never would have considered that it would be this loud.

That he would be haunted by the drip of leaky pipes overhead, the wailing of some dying animal trapped in its own airtight cage. That he would find himself filed, jam-packed and secure, behind the steel bars of a cage, a number instead of a name, a warrior instead of a coward.

A monster instead of a human.

It’s dark in his cell, cold and hard. There’s a puddle of unknown fluid in the corner, dripping from the ceiling, sparkling in the cracks of the walls. His throat is raw and dry, but he still hasn’t gotten thirsty enough to be curious about it. His thoughts still haven’t had enough time to untangle for him to make sense of much of anything here. To become adventurous enough to explore. To ask himself anything beyond,  _ ‘Why is this happening? Why am I here?’ _

_ ‘Why me?’ _

He doesn’t know how many hours it’s been now—how many days, how many months, how many years. His body aches. Beneath his dark body suit and the flimsy, tattered tunic, he feels the tug of dried blood collecting against his skin, pulling at his body hair, itching in places that are far too tender to scratch.

He feels an electricity popping inside of him, an anxious sort of excitement that he can’t put a name to, a sickness brewing with the colorless dinner slime in his belly, and he thinks about rabbits. About the men who used to hunt them in Keith’s hometown when he was just a kid. He thinks about those tiny, black button eyes staring up at him in the frigid winter air—tied together at the ankles by a rope in some hunter’s big fist, as he held up the bundle to brag to his friends in the early morning as Shiro passed by on his way to the orphanage.

He wonders what those rabbits must have thought about, just before the bullets pierced their skin. If they were afraid of death, if they even understood what was about to happen to them. If they thought that the cold black of nothingness would be better than living out their days behind the inescapable bars of a cage in a child’s bedroom.

If maybe, to be free was worth the risk of dying. If those rabbits might have embraced death with a dignity that he can no longer understand.

He thinks about how warm his mother’s bento used to feel in his hands, how the heat of it would fog up the transparent edges of its tupperware container. How his fingers would feel damp, then cold, then frozen as he passed the container through the bars of the fence to Keith.

He thinks about the angry red lines of unclean wounds on Keith’s young face—of the gaunt shadows beneath his eyes, the black gaps of missing teeth that he shouldn’t have lost all at once.

He wonders sometimes if Keith felt like a wild animal caught in a trap, when he’d gaze out of the bedroom window that he shared with a dozen other kids, and could only watch the sun bleeding through the dark morning clouds beyond the ugly black bars that bound him.

Other times, he thinks about every unchecked box on his bucket list. How he never saw Niagara Falls. How he never watched a solar eclipse. How he’d never said a real goodbye to his mother or any of his friends, how it’s been so long that he can barely remember what it must have felt like to hold someone.

He thinks about how he’s never seen the ocean, but he’s seen the churning of tsunami waves writhing in the depths of Lance’s eyes.

He tries to remember how it must have felt to be touched by another person, how fingertips felt when they pressed gently into his skin. How Keith’s teeth would sting against his throat before the apologetic swipe of that hot tongue; how it felt to kiss Lance in the practice ship. How it felt to be warm, wrapped up in the perpetual fog and the spray of the locker room shower, pushed firmly against the tile wall by Keith’s calloused hands. How Lance must have looked when he walked in on them, how Keith must have laughed when he ran away. How it felt to be loved by another human, a billion light years away from the shadowy trenches of this unending Hell.

There are no windows in this ship. He’s never seen the stars as he’s battled in the arena. He hasn’t breathed fresh air since he took off from Earth many, many months ago.

And the oxygen here feels like acid bubbling in his throat. If he opens his mouth to eat or to scream—to cry late in the night when even the faintest whimpers of some tortured soul off in the distance fade away—it feels as though he’s filling his lungs with bile. As though every ounce of ugliness in this horrible place has crawled inside of him and built a nest there.

_ “We carry those who love us everywhere, even out in space.” _

Someone told him that, what feels like many years ago now. He can’t remember what sort of expression they might have been making when they spoke. He can’t remember if it was his mother, or Keith. He can’t remember if it was someone else entirely, with a face that he can’t place anymore.

He can feel the reality of his old self crumbling within him, building back up into something that he doesn’t want to be. He can feel his memories splintering off, melding with the toxins in the air, tangling together with the death here—the blood on his hands, the blood beneath his clothes, the blood in his veins, so tainted by needles and prying fingers. His eyes blinded by a light overhead. Straps around his wrists, holding him down to the unforgiving surface of a cold, metal table. Pain tearing like fire through his veins, burning him from the inside out. The nerves of his arm stretched out and raw, dulled and scattered. His limbs feeling like jelly and unbreakable steel, all at once, not at all.

The bellowing laughter of a creature standing over him. So many eyes looking at him, looking  _ into _ him, peeling him open and poking around inside of him as though he were a frog splayed out to be dissected. The quivering of distant voices, the hum of consonants that blur together, that mean nothing more to him than the white noise perpetually buzzing deep inside of his head.

The glint of alien tools caught just right in the burning light above him. The words that he can’t understand.

_ “—a success.” _

_ “—our greatest weapon.” _

_ “—an unstoppable soldier.” _

He can’t make sense of anything anymore. His thoughts are jumbled. His heart is a racket in his chest. A small tingle starts an avalanche: he feels everything at once, nothing at all. He is powerful and terribly weak. He’s a wounded animal lashing out in desperation. He’s an abomination of a beast, mowing down every innocent, unassuming creature that gets in his way.

Some days, he can remember the battles. Some days, he can’t even remember his own name.

Sometimes he wonders who the boys are in his daydreams—the quiet one with the sad smile, the cocky one with the manufactured laugh. He wonders why his chest hurts when he thinks of them. He wonders if he was anyone before he was _ The Champion _ kept locked up in its cage.

He dreams of snake-like bars dragging him toward yellow-eyed demons, of murdering an unknown, cowering creature, begging in a language that he can’t decipher—begging him for its life, shackled helplessly with heavy chains to the ground, like the bait before a dogfight. He dreams of being tossed out into the vacuum of space. How liberating it might feel to float aimlessly, how wonderful it might be to find himself untethered by chains, by numbers, by black iron bars. How incredible it might be to _finally be_ _free_.

He dreams of Lance’s smiling face under a blanket of twinkling night, of words that he can’t quite remember, but they’re comforting and soft. They’re warm and welcoming, and everything that this place is not.

He dreams of Keith’s bubbling laughter, of how it felt to find himself wrapped up between the both of them. How it felt to worry about if they were eating right or sleeping enough. How it felt to be a real, autonomous person, absent of the constant, sticky stench of death. How it might have felt to have a name, and to be called by that name. How it might have felt to wake up each morning under the warmth of the sun filtering through his bedroom windows, without the ever-present worry that each day and each breath might be his last.

When he remembers them, he wonders if Keith and Lance are safe back on Earth.

When he remembers who he used to be, he hopes that they’ve forgotten all about him.

He doesn’t understand anymore why he wanted someone to come home to. He can’t remember what it must have felt like to look forward to whatever lies in his future.

But those words continue to haunt him:

_ We carry those who love us everywhere. _

He isn’t sure when they stopped reassuring him, when they started feeling more like a curse. He isn’t sure of anything anymore, but the hum of the drill in his skin. But the feeling of long, claw-like fingers burying themselves in his flesh and blood, in the marrow of his bones, in his most precious, private thoughts.

And he isn’t sure of anything but the way that light fades from the eyes of a dead adversary—like a human becoming a doll, he thinks. Like a hurricane fading out into a dull, gray sky.

Like a little boy watching life move around him through the bars of an orphanage. Like a rabbit hanging limply from a rope around its ankles.

Like a caged animal tasting freedom for the very first time.

_ We carry those who love us everywhere, even out in space. _

_ But not here _ , he begs and pleads.

_ Not here _ , he cries and cries.

_ Not here _ , his mantra, even as he’s staring at the reflection of a soulless monster in the wide eyes of another dead alien in the arena.

Please, God, not here.

_ Anywhere but here. _

 

* * *

 

The sun leaves angry blisters on his skin, that peel away as time passes, revealing the soft freckled tan of a fresh start underneath.

There is no sunscreen in the desert, and no matter how many times Keith sneaks into the Garrison’s stockpile of supplies late at night, he can’t seem to find wherever they keep it in all of those unassuming, unmarked boxes.

Honestly, with such an unorganized storage system, they’re just asking to be robbed blind. And while Keith doesn’t have the means to take everything that he needs all at once, he’s determined to do just that in time.

He still had a good semester’s worth of tuition left when they booted him, he reasons with himself. The scholarship check cleared regardless of any eventual expulsion. As far as he’s concerned, they owe him this much.

He lights a campfire composed of dried branches and lighter fluid, gives up roasting cans above the flame after the third one explodes. He eats his dinner just as the sun disappears beyond the horizon, tells himself that he doesn’t miss having a reliable, wind-resistant lighter when the breeze picks up and extinguishes the flame.

He tells himself that he doesn’t miss Lance. He doesn’t miss Shiro.

He doesn’t feel anything anymore.

He spends his days following a mysterious aura, far off in the distance. He explores caverns scrawled with strange hieroglyphs, steals a camera from an unlocked security office at the Garrison that spits out the photos that he takes automatically.

He hangs the pictures on a cork board in the middle of his one-room shack. He connects them with red thread, telling himself that he doesn’t have time for all of the metaphors, that he doesn’t have time for anything that won’t someday lead him back to Shiro.

At night, sometimes he dreams about Lance, and sometimes he dreams about Shiro. Sometimes he wonders if his father felt the same regret when he left him, if he’d hesitated as he walked through their front door one final time, or if it had been easier to leave someone like Keith.

If somehow, he’d known that Keith was poison. And he’d known, all along, that the longer he stuck around, the longer he’d risk catching whichever sickness it was within Keith that forced him to chase away everyone who ever cared about him.

He tells himself that he’s allowed to be melodramatic and vulnerable when he’s living out here, all by himself. If he were to cry sometimes, which he doesn’t, of course—he’s not some big baby like Lance, or like Shiro when they were kids—it’s not like anyone could see him anyway.

It’s not like there’s anyone left to look for him out here.

When the summer pushes itself, hot and oppressively thick, into the small reprieve of spring (the only indication, that it’s gotten so hot that he goes through three times as much water, and that the sun sits high in the sky even longer than it did before), he spends the worst days holed up in his cabin. He tries to trick himself into imagining that he has electricity, that his roommate has cranked up the air conditioning so high that he’s resorted to wrapping himself in three layers of blankets to conserve body heat.

Which might work, he thinks, if he’d ever actually done that. As it is, the Garrison dorms don’t even have personal A/C units, and he runs so hot naturally that he can rarely survive the night under a single sheet alone.

But the days are difficult, when it’s too hot and too dangerous to explore until it’s nearly nightfall. He reads the same worn pilot’s manuals that he’s went over thousands of times before, daydreams about flying the simulator again, writes down song lyrics and passages from stories that he remembers from his early days at the Garrison.

He sticks these on his corkboard as well, as though they mean anything. He tries to reason with himself that any intrusive thought could be tied to the strange force that draws him to the caverns with the lion hieroglyphs, but he stops himself from scribbling down Lance’s name too—from using up all of his sticky notes and all of his notebook paper to write out apologies that he knows he’ll never get the chance to actually deliver.

He never plans to set foot on Garrison property ever again without the cover of night, and he definitely can’t imagine that Lance would ever want to see him again anyway, with the way that he left without warning.

Lance wouldn’t be interested in any flimsy apology that he could offer, he’s sure. Lance would be better off if he’d never met a guy like him in the first place.

It’s better this way, he reasons. It’s better to leave Lance alone to live out the rest of his life with some semblance of normalcy. Maybe he’ll finally work hard enough to make fighter class. Maybe he’ll fall in love with some silly girl and the two of them can have the corny, Hollywood-esque sort of wedding that he’s sure a moron like Lance has always dreamed about.

He just can’t imagine himself ever being domestic enough to make someone like Lance happy.

He just can’t see himself ever being even a fraction of the person that someone like Lance really deserves.

It’s better this way. It has to be.

He can’t waste his time feeling any more regret. He can’t spend his days worrying over whether or not he should have told Lance about everything that he found in the Garrison’s secret files—if he should have stolen Lance from his bed, whisked him off on some sort of ridiculous coup.

If the two of them should have been sweating it out in the shack together, if only to abate his own selfish loneliness, if only so he wouldn’t have to spend his days wondering if he made the right decision when he pushed Lance away.

No, no more guilt. No more wondering.

Lance is better off at the Garrison. He’s better off never knowing what sorts of horrible things those bastards are hiding right underneath everyone’s noses.

But his pocket feels dreadfully light without that lighter, and his heart feels dreadfully hollow in the early morning hours, before he’s coherent enough to distract himself with all of his conspiracies and aimless plans.

It’s lonely, for the first two months that he marks off on his calendar. And he hates himself for being so weak. He wonders when he started becoming the sort of person with so many ties that he can feel each of them aching within him when he wakes up each day and falls asleep each night alone.

He hasn’t resorted to talking to himself, at least. And he hasn’t crafted some stupid imaginary friend for himself out of a blood-caked volleyball or some other inane garbage that Lance might reference from his stupid movies.

He’s sane enough, for now, that he can still stop himself from imagining what Lance might say about all of the weird things that he finds within the caverns. How Shiro might lecture him when he’s eating his eighth can of beans this week. He puts an end to those delusions immediately after he catches himself having them—determined that he doesn’t need either of them to survive here.

Determined that he’s still strong enough that he can go this alone.

After three months, he starts forgetting what it felt like to touch another person. He uses his voice so rarely that sometimes, when he talks in his sleep, he startles himself awake. He’s cut open cans with a cheap Garrison pocket knife that he swiped from the storage shed the very first night that he broke in. He eats cold beans and questionable canned meat, soaked in so much gravy and so many preservatives that it’s indecipherable from the grainy mud around his shack after a rare rainfall.

He stops imagining how Shiro’s face might look if he caught him skipping meals. How Lance might laugh at him for slipping in the puddles inside of the caverns when he’s trying to fill his canteen. He begins to forget, ever-so slowly, how Lance’s voice hitched when he’d howled angrily, or how he’d shudder out a moan when Keith touched him just right. How he used to guffaw, terribly loud, at even the most mundane of comedic events.

He starts to forget how warm and how safe Shiro’s arms used to make him feel when they wrapped around him. He forgets the soft lull of his voice late in the night. He forgets the vibration of something light and hopeful that used to blossom in his chest every time that Shiro looked at him—and how his smile used to bend at the edges, as though he were perpetually unsure of his own emotions.

He stops wondering if both of their lives would have been better without him, stops blaming himself for their misfortunes. He stops asking himself if he could have been a better lover, a gentler friend, a bigger man.

He stops dreaming of them, slowly. He stops waking up in the middle of the night, sweaty and teary-eyed, calling out for two distant lovers who he knows, deep down, that he’s damaged so terribly that he’ll surely never see either of them ever again.

With time, all that he can think about is the cavern and the lion hieroglyphs. He’s consumed by dreams of outer space, of flying so far and so fast that nothing can touch him anymore. He dreams about the suspicious files in the Garrison’s restricted office, of the strange circumstances of Kerberos’s failure, of the absolute revulsion that he’d felt when they’d pinned the whole thing on Shiro.

He realizes, eventually, that the lion carvings might never lead him back to Shiro. He’s mapped out every corner of those caverns day by day, and they’ve never given him anything but more questions, more feelings of longing for a home that he’s never known.

He doesn’t accept it, entirely, that these feelings can’t be connected somehow. That he could possibly feel hopeful and powerful and worthy in an empty, leaky cave, in the same way that he used to feel when he found himself in Shiro’s arms, when he told a joke that made Lance laugh. When he tangled himself between them and felt as though nothing in the world could ever hurt him again.

He still tells himself that cracking the code, that finding the knots that tie all of this together will help him figure out where Shiro’s gone. That he can fix this. That he can bring Shiro home. That he can finally face Lance without feeling so useless, if he manages to rescue the one person who might actually be worthy of Lance’s love.

He tells himself that he’s forgetting them, slowly. That he doesn’t need them anymore.

But when the desert heat fades out into the chill of the night, as the sun drops below the horizon and the night-creatures begin chirping and howling and calling out their midnight songs, he wonders if his fire would stay lit longer if he had a better lighter.

He wonders what sorts of things he might tell another person, if anyone else were here with him.

And when he falls asleep, despite his best efforts, he dreams of hazy locker rooms, of the warm press of fingers in his skin, of the feeling of being engulfed by another person—of falling desperately, hopelessly in love.

Eight months into his self-inflicted exile, Keith forgets what it feels like to not be lonely.

He forgets how it feels to joke, to laugh, to be touched by someone else.

He marks off another day in his calendar.

The caverns call out to him—silently, urgently.

And he hopes that Lance has met the love of his life, and that somewhere out there in the endless sky, Shiro is hiding somewhere safe.

 

* * *

 

Lance flicks open the lighter in his hand, dragging his thumb over the indents on the flint wheel without pushing down hard enough to actually light it.

He’s leaning over the ledge of the rooftop, watching lazily as students run drills down below. With a long, tired sigh, he closes his eyes, wishing away all of the memories and the painful nostalgia that come rushing through him as he thinks about the last time that he sat out here like this.

It’s been eight months since Keith disappeared.

He shouldn’t still be thinking about any of this. He needs to get over it, to stop dwelling.

He needs to stop imagining that he’ll wake up tomorrow and all of this will have been a bad dream—that Keith’s stupid, ugly mullet will be distracting him in first period, that Shiro will smile serenely at him in the halls.

That all of this will go back to normal, as though it hasn’t become so warped and horrible and so damaged beyond repair.

He isn’t sure what he would even say to Keith if he saw him again. If he’d punch him again and accept the repercussions, if he’d pretend that everything was okay.

If he’d even want to tell him that he finally made fighter class, that he’d filled Keith’s empty place.

That he’d wrecked the simulator so terribly today that Iverson kicked him out of class. That he’d been so embarrassed that he’d skipped his next period entirely, hiding up on the roof just like Keith used to.

That he hasn’t showered in the locker room since Shiro disappeared and Keith ran away. That he wakes up an hour early every morning so he can cry in his and Hunk’s shared bathroom without worrying that Hunk might hear him.

It’s so stupid, he thinks, cursing quietly and flicking the lid closed on the lighter. He shoves it roughly into his pocket, wishes that he hadn’t taken a moment to read that ridiculous inscription.

And it’s no wonder that Keith ditched him. That he saw no reason to stick around with a loser like Lance once Shiro wasn’t there to hold them together anymore. He’s so useless, so aggravating, so exhausting and dull that he’s surprised Keith even lasted that long.

Wherever that ugly-haired bastard is hiding out now, Lance hopes that he’s lonely. He hopes that he regrets leaving him behind.

He hopes that he’s okay.

With a sigh, he pushes himself off of the ground. He lopes toward the door, rolling his eyes as the dismissal bell rings behind it.

This would be the time when Shiro and Keith would meet up in the library. This would be the time that he’d purposefully cleared on his schedule—that he’d signed up for an early morning class this semester just so he could get out sooner and meet up with them too.

There’s nothing left for him to do today, except to lock himself in his dorm room and sleep for the rest of the afternoon until tomorrow morning’s shower and cry. There’s nothing left to do except to fool himself into thinking that he might actually do his homework. That he might actually eat the meals that Hunk still makes for him—despite the fact that even the most delicious flavor combinations that Hunk can conjure up still taste like dirt no matter how much he tells himself that he should love them.

He pulls open the door, slides into the stairwell. When he shoves his hands into his pockets, he can feel the lighter resting against his fingertips, nearly tears his hand away when he remembers what it is.

When he remembers that stupid, horrible smile of Keith’s when he’d looked at it. When he thinks about how fondly Shiro had looked around that thrift store. When he reminds himself how the two of them were wound so tightly together, how he’d never managed to find a place for himself among all of their knots.

Hunk still worries about him. That young cadet who’s wowed their commanders with his technical prowess—the one who somehow ended up teamed up with Lance, despite how much more talented he and Hunk are and how much they deserve a more qualified fighter pilot—he sometimes whispers to Hunk when he thinks that Lance can’t hear him. 

_ “What the Hell is this guy’s deal anyway? Why’s he always acting like he just got stood up at prom?” _

Pidge Gunderson, the young genius—so smart that he’s managed to pick Lance apart almost perfectly without knowing him at all.

He takes a longer path to his room, dreading his inevitable sleep and inevitable fitful dreams. Dreading the idea of Hunk walking in later in the afternoon and sending him that same sad, regretful smile and fumbling with his words as he tries to work out the best things to say.

He hates feeling like such a drain, like the physical manifestation of a black hole, sucking up everything in his path. He hates that Hunk feels as though he has to coddle him, as though he can’t boast about his straight A’s and how much he loves his instructors, that he can’t even feel happy when he sees Lance so miserable, without feeling that pure-hearted, well-meaning, Hunk-brand guilt.

The halls clear out just as he makes his way through the commander’s wing—flicks his gaze idly from the nameplates on the doors as his thoughts wander off to whatever sorts of adventures Keith might be having all on his own.

In his mind’s eye, he imagines something straight out of  _ Heavy Metal _ —the only film that he knows of that’s truly befitting of Keith’s horrendous retro mullet. He imagines a scribbly version of Keith flying space cars in the sky, a half-burned cigarette hanging precariously from his lips. And maybe Shiro is the big-breasted starlet that he saves from, say, a wild pack of space-goblins. And maybe he spends a little too much time imagining how they might look during the pornographic scenes—glitchy and de-saturated in that 1980’s cartoon style.

How the rock music would stave off into a more sultry tune as it panned to the image of Keith’s cigarette burning down in his ashtray, how the screen would flicker between a series of erotic images—Shiro’s chiseled ass, Keith’s nails dragging angry red trails down his back.

Their mouths opening in muted moans as the song picks up into something heavier, just before the scene changes to the two of them decapitating some kind of gigantic, skull-faced beast.

And maybe he’s so distracted by his internal argument with himself over whether or not they’d have the animation budget or the technology to include the stupid way that Keith’s ugly hair sheens a myriad of different shades when it catches the sun. Maybe he’s so busy imagining how Shiro’s eyes might twinkle a thousand different colors in cartoon form. But he doesn’t notice all of the screaming and banging coming from Iverson’s office until it’s far too late.

When the crumpled figure of another person is shoved violently through the door, just before it slams shut again, he’s so shocked that he can’t even scream.

A wave of panic washes over him momentarily, before his body moves on its own, flying forward and resting a hand on their shoulder, asking feebly if they’re okay, in a voice so scratchy and untrained that it almost sounds as though he’s going through puberty again.

The person on the floor turns angry, red-rimmed eyes up at him. She’s an older woman, no one who he’s seen before. There’s a wetness on her cheeks that he recognizes a lot more than he’d like to, smudged with the black of her mascara. She’s dressed in clothing far too nice to be a commander here. He imagines that she’s someone’s parent, some angry mother or grandmother of a failing student, demanding answers from a staff of instructors who couldn’t care less about any of it.

“H-hey, are… are you alright? Do you need, uh, the—the nurse or something?”

He doesn’t even have the strength to flirt with her, which, later on, when he’s finally coherent enough to go over this, is maybe the biggest tragedy wrapped up in a blessing that he’s ever experienced.

She’s a beautiful woman, he thinks, even though he’s never been one to go for older chicks. Her silvery hair is tied back in a loose bun, frizzy and unruly from her fall. Her eyes are dark, nearly jet black, familiar in a way that clenches deep in his chest, even though he doesn’t understand it.

She doesn’t smile, but she thanks him for coming forward to help her. She takes his offered hand, pulling herself up clumsily and complaining about how weak her muscles have become with age.

And before she turns her attention to him fully, she reels back towards Iverson’s closed door.

“I’m coming back, you bastard!” she howls, a fist waving in the air. “If you think I’m just some helpless old lady who you can shut out and never hear from again, you’ve got another thing coming! You hear me, you’re in deep shit, Iverson! You’re not getting away with this!”

A chill shudders up Lance’s spine. When she turns back toward him, he finds it very difficult to offer her a smile. To mask his terror before she can have the opportunity to sniff out his newfound fear.

“They’re, uh… they’re really good at that.” he tells her, his words slow and dumb as she finally lets go of his hand to brush herself off. “At hiding things, and… keeping people away. I-I mean, um… you didn’t hear it from me, but… a guy disappeared from here a few months ago, and now they’re acting like he never even went here.”

Immediately, she perks up. She stares at him long and hard—long enough that he starts shuffling uncomfortably from foot to foot, regretting speaking without thinking and feeling entirely too naked and exposed under her intense gaze.

“Are you talking about Keith Kogane?” She asks, raising a brow.

She reaches down to grab her bag from the floor, that Lance hadn’t even noticed as it was hurled out of the room behind her. She digs around inside of it, pulling out a notebook and a pen before she says anything else. Lance gets the feeling that he shouldn’t be talking to her about any of this, that he if divulges her any further, he might find himself out in the wilderness, just like Keith.

“Did you know Keith personally? What did they tell you when he disappeared?”

And he wonders if she’s some kind of reporter, or if she’s a private investigator. He wonders if she’ll publish an article about all of this, if she’s hoping to expose all of the injustices here, to shine an unflinching light on the Galaxy Garrison and hopefully, to finally find out where Keith ran off to in the middle of the night.

“Uh, well, do you think we can talk about this somewhere else? I mean, my roommate still has class for another hour, so it’s… private.”

He’s never asked a girl into his dorm room before. Figures that the reality of “moving on and meeting women to replace his bastard, missing-in-action, only surviving significant other” would be inviting some old grandma who might obliterate his chances of ever graduating to talk about the same asshole who ditched him.

But she nods regardless, and he quickly forgets all of those nagging feelings of dread.

And he thinks to himself, so be it.

At the very least, if they kick him out, he can finally start looking for Keith.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, happy Thursday! So this chapter is… one of my two favorites. I believe I’ve said that before, but since finishing the writing portion of this story, chapters 26 and 30 really stood out as my top two. This week’s title is from another song that I listened to a lot while writing. It’s called [‘Roses and Violets’ by Alexander Jean](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXqMlzRABwE). 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it! See you next Thursday!


	27. Regret is a Dish Served Lukewarm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s about time that he stops seeing everything through such childish, rose-tinted lenses. It’s about time that he accepts that fact that if anyone is looking for Keith, it’s because he’s part of some bigger conspiracy.

In nearly one hundred degree weather, in the endless stretch of a bone-dry desert, Keith can’t stop sneezing.

He’s sweating it out in whatever the  _ “decrepit shack in the middle of empty miles of nothing but cacti and scorpions” _ -equivalent of a front yard might actually be called, wiping the dust from his hover-car and wondering idly if the supply shed at the Garrison might provide hats or sunglasses, or even one of those little tourist mini-fans that squirt water.

And despite his best efforts, he can’t stop himself from sneezing.

He remembers all of the old adages, how an endless barrage of sneezes might mean that someone is talking bad about you, but he brushes them off. He’s never been superstitious, and he definitely doesn’t have time for children’s fairy tales and the boring proverbs that old people used to say any time that something strange happened.

He has all of the time in the world now, and even still, he doesn’t feel like he needs to be wasting it wondering if Lance is bad-mouthing him to some new girlfriend of his.

It’s a stupid thought that leaves him feeling a lot more bitter than he’d care to admit. It’s so aggravating that he welcomes the next wave of sneezes and sniffles just for the distraction. He tells himself that it’s just the sand and the sun, irritating his senses. He tells himself that his anger is aimed more at the idea that Lance might still be talking bad about him, and less about the idea of him cuddling up with someone else.

And what would he even have to say, anyway?

_ “That asshole Keith left me after taking my virginity” _ ?

_ “The stupid bastard harassed me for weeks, just to leave me behind when things got hard” _ ?

_ “That horrible, heartless piece of shit made me fall in love with him, but of course he ruined it just like he always ruins everything else” _ ?

Yeah, sure, that’s fair enough. He curses quietly, wiping his nose on his sleeve. Each and every one of those would be perfectly reasonable complaints, he has to admit. So maybe Lance has a little bit of leverage in the _ “bitter ex lover”  _ department, and maybe he’s left Keith with more regretfully wonderful memories than Keith ever cared to leave behind for him.

Maybe he ditched out on Lance when he really needed him, and he pushed too hard when Lance was only trying to pull him closer. Maybe he should have waited to sneak into the Garrison’s private offices, should have allowed the dust to settle and the pain to dull just a little before leaving Lance to deal with all of this alone.

But he doesn’t want to think about a Lance who can’t forget about him, even after all of this time. And he doesn’t want to think about a Lance who could move on so easily either.

He doesn’t want to consider that maybe Lance was happy when he left. That in the wake of his uncontrollable anger, the way that he can’t even  _ mourn _ like a normal person, maybe Lance was relieved that he wouldn’t have to put up with him any longer.

He doesn’t want to entertain the idea that some pretty little thing with softer, gentler hands might be filling up a void that he left in Lance, that might not have even been that big to begin with.

That maybe he’s just flattering himself when he thinks that Lance wouldn’t be able to move on. That maybe it’s his own selfish, inflated ego that’s convinced him that he’s worth even the tiniest place in the back of Lance’s mind.

And it hurts, of course, a lot more than he wants to admit. And he feels angry all over again, lost and oh-so terrified. He wonders what he’s even done with his life but inconvenience other people, but burden them with his own confusing, ugly behavior. He wonders if he’s done nothing with this life but fuck everything up for the only people kind enough to give him the time of day.

He wonders if he’s damaged Lance in a way that no pretty girl and no amount of months or distance between them could ever hope to repair.

And still, it’s for the best. It’s better for Lance to patch himself up and move on. It’s better if Lance never experiences the full brunt of his shameful, deplorable weaknesses.

It’s better if they draw only more distant. If so much time passes without him that Lance starts to wonder if he was ever there at all.

He wipes the same clean spot on his hover-car nearly a dozen times. He sneezes and sneezes and wipes his nose angrily until his nostrils sting.

And he tells himself that Lance is happier, surely.

And if the adages are true and this tickle in his nose has really been triggered by someone talking about him, hopefully, Lance is telling a new lover how much better off he is without the baggage that comes along with a person like Keith Kogane.

 

* * *

 

“So tell me, Mr. McClain, how exactly did the Garrison go about announcing the news of Keith’s departure?”

The woman’s pen scratches against her notepad, despite the fact that Lance hasn’t told her much of anything but his name since he opened his door and ushered her inside of his room. He’s thankful that he didn’t run into any commanders or fellow students on his way here, but he wonders if that might have been better, in the long run.

If maybe it really wasn’t that bright of an idea after all to get himself wrapped up with someone who refers to him has  _ “Mr. McClain” _ while taking rapid notes each time that he opens his mouth.

“Please,” he tells her, in a cavalier tone that sounds fake even in his own ears, “Call me Lance. Mr. McClain is my father.”

He adds a wink and a charming glint of his teeth for good measure, but she only stares at him blankly. After an awkward moment, she flicks her gaze back to her notepad, scribbling something down before turning back to him with an even deeper frown than before.

“Would you say that the Garrison staff seemed to be keeping secrets when they announced Keith’s departure, _ Mr. McClain _ ? Or did it seem as though they might have actually believed what they were telling you?”

The corners of his smile twitch nervously at the coldness that’s practically dripping from her words. He gets the feeling that if he doesn’t start talking soon, she might unleash some of that earlier rage on him as well.

And sure, his right hook has improved since Keith took the time to properly train him and self-defense class actually started teaching  _ self-defense _ , but even if he had no qualms about knocking out little old ladies, he isn’t sure how good his odds would be against her.

“W-well, um.” He scratches the back of his head, focusing his gaze on the corner of Hunk’s hot plate peeking out from under his bed as he attempts to collect his thoughts, to compose them into hopefully less clumsy sentences before he makes an even bigger ass out of himself. “They didn’t really announce anything. One day he was just… gone. And no one talked about it. When people started asking questions, they just kept calling it a  _ “disciplinary issue” _ , but they wouldn’t explain any more than that.”

He pauses briefly, dropping his hand into his lap and tipping his head back to stare up at the ceiling. He imagines, for a short moment, that he’s back on the roof with Shiro. That he finally understands what the right things are to say, that he can offer him some small comfort before he goes away forever.

He might be fucking up his own future, but maybe talking to this reporter/detective/potential CIA agent can help Keith somehow. Maybe there’s actually someone out there who’s good enough to find him. Maybe there’s a mother out there, or a father out there, or a foster parent or distant relative who actually cares enough to search for him.

It’s a nice thought, surely, that Keith would make fun of him for even entertaining.

_ “I ruin everything, and I’m just gonna ruin you too!” _

It’s about time that he stops seeing everything through such childish, rose-tinted lenses. It’s about time that he accepts that fact that if anyone is looking for Keith, it’s because he’s part of some bigger conspiracy.

If this woman is asking questions, it probably doesn’t actually have anything to do with Keith alone.

It probably has more to do with that supposed “pilot error” from a perfect pilot, the “disciplinary issue” from a model student, the hundreds of mysteries piled up beneath the shaky foundation of the Garrison that threaten to tumble down if even one brick is rattled just a little too hard.

“But I think… I think it has something to do with another student. I mean, he—he was really upset after Kerberos failed, and I think—I think he might have done something crazy and they don’t wanna talk about it.”

The woman stiffens, for a fraction of a second. Her eyes narrow, harden, then glaze over. There’s a myriad of emotions that work their way over her expression far too quickly for Lance to decipher, a familiar crease of the corners of her lips that he can’t place on anyone else.

He wonders if he’s seen her lurking around here before. If he was just too distracted by his silly tryst with Keith and Shiro to think anything of it. If maybe she was booted out of Iverson’s office with good reason, and he’s not even doing Keith any favors by entertaining her like this.

Suddenly, she speaks again, and her voice breaks through his rampant thoughts so sharply, so unexpectedly that he flinches at the sound of it.

“Takashi Shirogane, right? The student that disappeared, the one who Keith cared about. It was Takashi, correct?”

She knows too much already. He’s suddenly painfully aware of the fact that no one outside of the Garrison would ever know or care about such mundane, yet personal information.

Many of the commanders didn’t even seem aware enough of Keith and Shiro’s friendship to offer Keith comfort in the wake of Shiro’s disappearance. There were flyers handed out in the halls, announcements made over the intercom early in the morning. Students sharing Shiro’s rank were called into the counselor’s office for mandatory mental checkups. There were grief support groups every evening for a full three weeks.

But no one but Lance reached out to Keith.

Maybe they were afraid of the storm brewing deep inside of him. Maybe they just didn’t understand how to handle him. Maybe the stony facade that he’d built around himself was so daunting that everyone just wanted to pretend that he was okay instead of taking a risk and offering him comfort.

Maybe Keith really was so good at seeming untouchable and unfeeling that no one even knew that he was broken and lost, and so desperately scared. Maybe they hadn’t been close enough to see the way that he shirked away when someone touched him tenderly. Maybe they just hadn’t seen the way that he panicked when Lance was only trying to run his fingers through his hair.

Maybe his sadness was too honest, too ugly and _ real _ . Maybe they just couldn’t handle staring at him for too long.

But this woman seems to understand that Shiro’s disappearance, that his  _ death _ (it hurts to even consider it, despite all of the warning bells ringing relentlessly in his head. Despite the ever-present reality of this situation sitting deep in the pits of his heart), would have devastated Keith. That it would have been enough to push him over the edge.

“Y-yeah, it was Shiro. They were pretty close, you know? Like,  _ ‘lots of people thought that they were gay together’ _ kinda close.”

She smiles at that, but it’s gone so quickly that Lance doesn’t have time to consider where he’s seen a smile like that before. Why it tugs painfully at his heartstrings, why it makes him feel helpless and lightheaded.

Why it’s somehow hard to look at, but oh-so warm and comforting all at the same time.

“And what did  _ you _ think, Mr. McClain? Did you think that they might have been  _ ‘gay together’ _ ?”

There’s something about the way that she asks that question that gives him the feeling that she already knows the answer. It’s frustrating, if he’s honest with himself, that she seems to know so much about Keith and Shiro, but nothing about him.

That she doesn’t seem to have a secret archive of information on his role in their relationship, as though her lack of knowledge somehow further cements all of his insecurities and all of his fears—that he really, truly meant so little to both of them that even a woman who seems to know everything about them still doesn’t know about Lance’s place in their lives.

He’s needlessly angry, suddenly feeling very petty, and he wants nothing more than to prove her wrong. He wants to wipe that smug expression right off of her face, to make her realize that she doesn’t know everything, that she can’t intimidate him into feeding her the right information just because she has some kind of secret arsenal of intel about his late boyfriends.

And he speaks without thinking enough about the words as they’re leaving his mouth. Like the idiot that he is, like a moron with no concept of secrets or subtleties, he still manages to surprise her, just like he’d intended to.

He just hadn’t taken the time to consider that he might feel like an imbecile once he actually shocked her.

“Well, duh, I knew they were together. I mean, I was _ with them _ too. You know, like,  _ dating _ ? We were pretty serious too. Like, secret-romantic-midnight  _ rendezvous _ kind of serious, ya feel me?”

It comes out a lot less suave and a lot more stilted than it had sounded in his head. His voice trails off near the end, as the realization of what he’s just admitted to a total stranger belatedly sinks in.

He can already imagine the headlines of whatever stupid article or super secret CIA file she’s gathering all of this information for:  _ “Garrison Flunky Confesses to Secret Orgy” _ , _ “Lance McClain: Total jackass and all-around failure at life admits that he’s been spit-roasted by two guys way out of his league. Even the reporter doesn’t really believe him” _ .

And maybe it’ll be more eloquent than that, because he’s never been very good with words, but it’ll still be enough to forever ruin his reputation. To shame him and get him expelled, to permanently etch an expression of sadness and disappointment on his mother’s face and to ostracize him from everyone who used to think so highly of him back home.  

The pen squeaks against the notebook slower now, as though this woman is either still too shocked by his inappropriate confession to know what to write, or she’s just not sure exactly how to phrase it. Once the pen stills, there’s a moment of awkward silence, in which Lance wishes that he could have been less chivalrous for once in his miserable life and left this seemingly helpless old woman lying on the floor.

“So you’re aware that Keith had no friends or family outside of the Garrison then, correct? You must have known what the staff here also knew: that no one would care if an orphan disappeared without a trace?”

The question hits him square in the gut. It nearly knocks the wind out of him, gives him whiplash, sends him shooting out of his seat and straight into the hall. But he’s too surprised by how much it hurts, to actually hear someone say it out loud, to do anything that his mind is screaming at him.

He’d always known that minus Shiro, minus himself, Keith really had no one else in the world. And he might have suspected that the Garrison knew this as well, that the one true ace up their sleeve was the fact that no one would ask questions if anything happened to Keith.

A model student, in every conceivable way. He almost laughs.

Reliable, passionate, talented, and so utterly  _ disposable _ .

“Yeah, I—I knew about that… I just—I’m not like Keith. I’m not brave enough to get in trouble to find answers. I don’t know what I’d do if I got booted out of here, I mean, my parents spent half their savings buying my plane ticket and I can’t let them down. I-I just, I should have looked for him. I should have done something, but I—”

“No one is blaming you, Lance.” She says his name for the first time, softly and so carefully that a strange wave of nostalgic sadness suddenly washes over him. He still can’t place it, but he accepts it nonetheless. He allows himself to be comforted by a person who he still isn’t sure that he should trust. He allows himself to give in to the self-indulgent fantasy that none of this is his fault. “I think we both know that Keith rarely looks before he leaps. If something happened to Takashi, I swear that boy wouldn’t stop raging until everyone paid for it.”

She laughs, just as sudden and startling as everything else. Her laughter isn’t a hesitant bubble like Keith’s and it isn’t the soft vibrato of Shiro’s. But there’s something about it that reminds him of his mother—a fondness that he doesn’t understand, a lovingness that softens all of her hard edges and allows him to see her for what she really is.

She’s sad too, he realizes. She’s desperate. She cares about Keith and Shiro with a tenderness that seems misplaced. She cares about all of this with a ferocity that a stranger just wouldn’t have.

He wonders, for a moment, who this person really is. He wonders where she ties into all of this, how she came into contact with someone like Keith and risked the singed fingers just to reach for that fire burning within him. How she somehow got close enough that she could see what that beautiful person beneath all of the walls and all of those prickly defenses.

“I need you to be honest with me, Lance.” she adds, after enough time passes that she seems to realize that he’s not going to say anything else. “Is there any doubt in your mind, any  _ suspicion at all _ that the Kerberos mission’s failure might not have been an accident?”

It’s another cutting suggestion, another question that he isn’t sure if he’s capable of answering. It’s just another fear of his, swelling with his insecurities, with all of the self-hatred and the sadness deep inside of him, threatening to rip him open. And he can’t speak, once he wraps his head around what she’s asking him. He can’t admit it out loud, that all along he’s never believed that Shiro could be responsible for anything so horrible.

In the absence of words, when he knows that his vocal cords would fail him—that his tongue would fall flat and his voice would only muddle the message that he’s trying to convey—he nods. Only once, sharp and quick, but the pen scratches against paper once again, before the woman shoves the notepad back into her bag and stands to leave.

“I won’t keep you any longer,” she tells him, not looking at him as she searches her pockets. “I’m not sure how long I can stay here before your commanders start getting suspicious.”

He’s still far too light-headed and emotionally drained to focus on what she’s doing when she presents him with a business card—a thick, off-white, unassuming thing that feels dreadfully heavy when he plucks it out of her hand.

“If you think of anything else, please don’t hesitate to call me from a private line. I believe there should be payphones in town, right? My office is open from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., but if you tell them your name, they should forward you to my personal line.”

She makes her way to the door. She thanks him for speaking with her. She’s gone just as suddenly as she crashed into his life, without a trace, like a shadow instead of a person. Like a ghost in his imagination. Like Keith and Shiro both coming around just long enough to mix everything up before vanishing forever.

And he can’t focus on the name on the card for a very long time, as his thoughts whirl around in his head and his heart pounds relentlessly inside of his chest.

But eventually, and regretfully late, he realizes why her smile looked so familiar. He realizes why he loved the sound of her laugh.

He realizes why he was an even bigger ass than he’d suspected, when he blurted out that he’d been banging Keith and Shiro for months before they both disappeared.

The last name on the card is  _ “Shirogane” _ , and he knows, so belatedly, why he’d found her so attractive. Why she seemed to know so much about Keith and Shiro, why she seemed to care so deeply about any of this.

The only person outside of this horrible place who would actually miss a lost child like Keith Kogane.

He always told himself that he’d charm the pants off of Shiro’s mom if he ever got to meet her, and he should have known, even back then, that he’d royally fuck it up.

Maybe he couldn’t have known that he’d do it exactly like this, but he feels like he should be proud of himself.

Even for him, this is an all time low.

 

* * *

 

Katie Holt feels, in the deepest depths of her cold, vengeance-obsessed heart, that maybe, sometimes, she might have dug herself into a hole here that’s even too deep for her to handle on her own.

It’s only been a few months since the beginning of the fall semester, since she cut off her hair and donned the Garrison uniform. Since she slipped away from home with little more than a note to her mother, telling her that she would be okay, and a resignation to finally uncovering everything that the Garrison was hiding about the Kerberos mission, if it was the last thing that she did.

She hates to admit that sometimes, she might get a little too invested in the mundane day-to-day around the compound. Sometimes she actually catches herself laughing at some of Lance’s lame jokes. Sometimes she finds herself feeling bitter and scorned in place of him, as Iverson chides him relentlessly about his shaky standing as a fighter pilot, as he continues to compare him to whatever sorry loser got booted out before him.

And she wishes sometimes that she were more adept at reading people, that she knew what to say when it seemed as though someone really needed a friend. As it is, she’s lacking in a lot of areas that don’t involve technology or science. She doesn’t know what to say when Lance turns his gaze down to the floor, when he flinches at the mention of that former cadet. When he looks so lost and lonesome that she can’t believe that Iverson has the gall to continue badgering him.

Sure, Lance is an annoying, misogynistic asshole. He’s not funny most of the time, and not nearly as clever as he thinks that he is. His taste in movies is absolute garbage, and she catches him checking out the asses of a lot of guys in their class a lot more than any other “straight” guy who she’s ever met.

And she really doesn’t care about any of that, just like she doesn’t really care about someone like Lance. Her father and Matt used to talk about the renowned pilot, the prodigy named Takashi Shirogane. Her father used him as an anecdote to explain to her that person’s sexual preferences don’t make them any less great of a person. It was a mortifying conversation, just as any coming-of-age speech had been for the both of them, and she still isn’t entirely sure what someone like Officer Shirogane had to do with the latent homosexual feelings that her dad must have suspected that she was having—since she’d always cared more about computers than about boys.

But he never actually managed to get around to where Shiro tied in with  _ “your mother and I will still love you no matter who you love” _ . Sure, she’s smart enough that she was able to fill in the obvious dots, but her dad was a lot more talented at giving those inspirational pep-talks, it seemed, when it didn’t involve the concept of who his young daughter might have been lusting after.

She didn’t have the heart, after such a long, heartfelt speech, to tell him,  _ “I’m not attracted to anyone, dad.” _

And so she was left with a lot of questions, and not nearly enough answers. And another pressing reason why she needs to find the Kerberos pilots as soon as possible, if only so she can finally meet this Takashi Shirogane in all of his great, allegedly gay, glory.

She curses herself for letting her mind wander, for getting too distracted to concentrate on the task at hand. She’s rigged a tiny mechanism to the keypad just outside of the door leading out to the roof. She listens to it beep and sputter as it attempts to crack the password so she can get some fresh air.

She’d needed to test the speed of this thing before she risked using it on any of the doors to the confidential offices. And right now, she’s thankful that she did.

It’s making such slow work of cracking the code that she’s pretty sure that simple trial and error could have figured it out just as fast.

After a moment that feels more like an hour, she taps her foot impatiently and cranes her neck to make sure that no one’s creeping down the halls. Her little machine lets out a satisfactory beep, the tiny light near the top flashes green to signify that it’s finally unlocked the door.

She tugs on the handle hesitantly, pausing to lean back and inspect the darkened halls one last time—praying that the officers on night-watch don’t happen to make an early round through this hall just before she manages to close the door behind her.

At the silence and the unmoving darkness, she takes a deep, steadying breath. Then slowly, she pulls open the door.

While she might have expected to find a commander or a security guard keeping watch of the building out on the roof, or maybe even a cat burglar—or the supposed rogue thief who’s rumored to have stolen hundreds of dollars worth of supplies from the sheds out back, no matter how much the school keeps ramping up the security—the last person that she expects to see when she steps through the door is Lance.

She almost backs away and closes the door behind her. Almost calls it a night and goes to bed early, worrying that she might have went too long without sleep again. That she might have pushed herself too hard when she’d been putting together this new creation, because surely, she’s hallucinating right now.

Surely, someone like Lance wouldn’t be able to figure out a way around security before even  _ she _ managed to, when it had taken her hours of meticulous work and nearly twenty minutes of standing around waiting just to get this far.

But before she can decide on fight or flight—before she can give in to her temptation to run for it, or to demand that Lance tell her exactly what kind of tech he threw together to get out here, she hears the ting of something metal clicking open, sees the yellow flame of a lighter igniting in Lance’s hand.

And he speaks to her, even with his back turned, as though he isn’t worried that it might be Iverson behind him. As though he isn’t afraid of getting caught breaking too many rules to count.

As though he doesn’t care about much of anything anymore. Like he’s over this place, like he would want nothing more right now than an excuse to finally leave.

“You’re gonna have to find somewhere else to hang out. This is _ Lance territory _ .”

She clicks her tongue. Even when he’s being surprisingly cool, he’s still the biggest loser who she’s ever met.

“I don’t see your name written anywhere around here.” she tells him, tight-jawed and already on edge. She doesn’t like how reckless he seems right now. She doesn’t like the slack line of his shoulders as he leans against the ledge, the way that he’d barely even reacted as he heard her speak, as though nothing could surprise him anymore. “How’d you even get out here anyway?”

She bristles at the sound of his laughter, despite how low and quiet it is, how quickly he bites it off. Something is wrong, she can tell. It might be the fact that Iverson gave him a real earful earlier, humiliated him in front of the entire class. It might have more to do with the fact that Hunk shushes her every time that she makes some sort of comment about how “lovesick and heartbroken” he always seems. How he acts like the protagonist from some lame romance movie, just before the montage when the lovers reunite.

She doesn’t have time to mess around, wondering what in the world is bothering someone like Lance. She doesn’t have the patience to figure out why he’s so dead set on acting cool and casual no matter how sad he gets as soon as he thinks that no one is looking.

She doesn’t have it in her to wonder if Hunk was right about Lance—if he really used to be a good student. If being a fighter pilot was really his dream, before all of this. Because he’s ruining it now, and he’s allowing this opportunity to slip past him at record speed, and none of this will even matter as soon as she uncovers all of the Garrison’s secrets and burns this place to the ground.

Finally, he turns, even if it isn’t all the way around. He cranes his neck to look at her—a strangely manufactured sort of frown on his face. As though he’s trying to convince her that he cares a lot less about any of this than he should. As though she could continue standing here, invading his private moment, and he wouldn’t do anything to stop her.

She doesn’t like the idea that he’s trying to play it cool. She doesn’t like the thought that he could potentially mess up everything if he so much as ratted out the both of them.

There’s a dangerous look in his eyes, and a blitheness about him that makes her feel as though he could get himself in trouble and not even care. As though she might be giving him the excuse that he was looking for to get expelled.

And she doesn’t understand why he’s even still here then. Why he’s sticking around when hundreds of potential students would die for the opportunity to take his place.

“Should you really be talking to a senior officer like that?” he asks her, a slow lull to his voice, as though he’s falling asleep, “I used to have connections here, you know. Some stupid password is  _ nothing _ for someone like me.”

She places her hands on her hips, cocking one to the side. She tips her head, raising a brow and and staring at him, long and hard, as she tries to get a feel for what he might actually being trying to tell her.

Is he threatening her with these “connections”? Has he figured out what she’s actually here to do? Is he offering to help?

“I don’t see any _ senior officer _ here. Just some washed up flunky who can’t even manage not to wreck the simulator.”

It’s a cruel thing to say, she knows, and maybe she regrets it as he flinches. As a look of hurt washes over his face—as he opens up then, far too stupid or honest, or maybe just too wounded to even have the decency to hide it.

He turns back to the night, gazing up at the stars. She can’t see his face now, but she tries to imagine what he might be thinking. If he hates her as much as she tries to tell herself that she hates him. If he’s regretting all of the decisions that led him here, just as she sometimes regrets this path that she’s forged for herself.

If sometimes, he wishes that the world around them weren’t so broken, if only so the two of them could live normal lives like normal people.

“You’re right,” he tells her, after some time passes, “I’m not gonna rat you out. You can chill.”

She doesn’t move forward, and she doesn’t make any attempt to further the conversation. But she breathes in the night air, allowing herself to calm down, to lower her defenses. She isn’t sure if she should feel bad about all of the twists and turns of this conversation—how he’d obviously tried to reach out and lessen the tension here, but she hadn’t allowed him to.

How she’d lashed out and hurt his feelings when he was just trying to be nice. How she can’t ever seem to get relationships right, no matter how hard she tells herself that she’s trying.

“I don’t know what sneaky stuff you’re doing around here, but don’t even think about trying to get a piece of my  _ connections _ .” Lance tells her. His voice is sudden, but soft. She watches the way that he rolls the stress out of his shoulders, how he shuffles his feet and tips his head back further to take in more of the night sky. “They’re gone anyway… dead, probably. I don’t know.”

A shudder works up her spine. She doesn’t like looking at the stars. She doesn’t like thinking too much about which direction she might have to shoot up—which black gap between them might be hiding her father and Matt.

And she doesn’t want to think about what he’s saying, about who he might be referring to. She knows better than to assume that everything around here needs to be connected to Kerberos. She knows better than to hope that the gnawing holes in Lance’s heart might perfectly match her own.

She didn’t come here to make friends. She didn’t come here for closure.

She came here for answers, and for revenge.

“Is that why you’re always acting like a moody jackass?”

He laughs again, shakes his head from side to side, lowers his gaze from the sky.

“Probably,” he tells her, “Iverson’s right about one thing, at least. I am kind of an idiot.”

She resists the urge to tell him that he’s wrong, because if she really thinks about it, he isn’t. And maybe she’s an idiot too—for not being able to let this go. For refusing to believe that anything in the universe could be an accident—that the renowned pilot who her father used to speak so highly of could have really been the cause of his inevitable death.

Maybe they’re both idiots, denying the truth, dwelling in the absences of those who used to love them. Building walls around their broken hearts and freezing themselves in the very moment that everything changed for them—refusing to move forward and to heal. Refusing to grow bigger than the tragedy that consumes them, to learn to live with the ache that their loved ones left behind.

She doesn’t know Lance’s story, but she feels like she can understand it.

She feels, with much anguish, that it might not be that different from her own.

Lance flicks the flint of his lighter, reigniting the flame. She watches his head drop, imagines the way that his eyes might be trained to it. She wonders why he carries it with him everywhere, thinks about the way that he takes it out of his pocket when he thinks that no one is paying attention.

Why he stares at it like it means something—as though it’s more than stupid contraband that he totes around even though she’s sure that he doesn’t even smoke.

The lighter clicks closed, and Lance pushes himself away from the ledge. He saunters by her, forever artificially casual, forever putting on the shaky facade of someone who doesn’t care about anything.

“Good talk,  _ Pidge Gunderson _ ,” he tells her, patting his hand against her shoulder, moving slowly towards the door, “Instead of messing around for twenty minutes trying to get out here next time, why don’t you try  _ 0825 _ ? No need to thank me, I know, I’m the coolest.”

The door closes behind him, and Pidge is left with her annoyance and the silence, the heavy heat of the evening air. She’s left wondering who might have told him that password, who might have left him behind.

She doesn’t connect those dots until much later.

But for now, she moves toward the ledge, and for the first time in a long time, she takes a moment to look up at the stars.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, three weeks left now! I’m honestly… really sad to see this story end, even though it’s been a very long journey! So, next week, I’m actually going to be across the state at an art show when chapter 28, is due, so my beta was kind enough (again) to agree to post for me! So thank you to them, again! They’ve truly been a huge help during this big project. 
> 
> Also, this is the last chapter before the 22nd, which is a very dear friend’s birthday. So to **Poetic_Nothing** , happy early birthday! I hope this chapter was good for you, buddy! And I hope that you have a very lovely week, and an awesome birthday. 
> 
> Anyway, as always, thank you so much for reading!


	28. A Spark in the Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something is going to happen tonight, and it’s happening at the Galaxy Garrison.

****_ Keith’s eyes are wide and clouded, his lips full and dark and soft as he presses his wet, hungry mouth against the dip of Lance’s chin. He’s all teeth, as always—all jagged-edged nails raking over Lance’s damp skin. All force and eagerness, all silent begging for a quick end to all of this, so he can continue pretending that he doesn’t enjoy being close to another person. _

_ Lance bites out something akin to a laugh, but maybe it’s a moan. The noises bubbling up inside of him rattle through his teeth, breathy, needy, and quiet below all of the deep breathing around him. _

_ His bed creaks below their weight, and he jumps ever-so slightly as another pair of hands draw slow circles just above the cleft of his backside. _

_ “He’s sensitive everywhere if you get him worked up enough.” _

_ Shiro’s lips are warm against the crook of his neck. Like silk, like smoke—so gentle that they might as well not even be there at all. _

_ His fingers prod tentatively into the creases of Lance’s ribs. _

_ “Go ahead,” Shiro whispers, hot breath against his hair. “Touch him, Lance.” _

_ He can feel the firm press of Shiro’s erection between his cheeks. He can feel Keith’s sharp nails pinching his nipples. _

_ “Touch him before he leaves. Touch him before he’s gone forever.” _

_ Touch him before you mess everything up. _

Lance’s breath feels thick and sticky in his throat as he shoots upwards out of sleep. His heart pumps hard in the depths in his chest.

He’s sweaty and far too warm now, tangled in the sheets in his bed. Hunk is snoring quietly in the blackness across the room.

He can still feel the whispers of touch against his skin, under his pajamas, reaching deep inside of him and staining the walls of his heart, the stems of his lungs, burning hot in the pits of his belly. Filling him with bubbling acid as the ghost of sensation slowly ebbs away.

Shiro’s voice swirls around in his thoughts. The sting of Keith’s nails had felt so real that he can still sense the crescents of them tingling in his skin.

He has three hours left until he needs to wake up for class.

He draws his knees close to his chest, burying his face into them. He wraps shaking arms around himself, eyes screwed tightly closed as his breath continues to catch in his throat.

He can’t stop shaking, no matter how hard he tries. He can’t stop himself from thinking of Shiro’s smile, crystallized somewhere far, far away in the black pool of the night sky. He can’t stop imagining Keith’s bones picked clean by starving animals in a dry, barren desert.

In the dark and the heat, all alone in a world of sleeping people, Lance allows himself to cry without the safety of the showerhead spitting loudly around him.

Hunk doesn’t wake up. The lights don’t turn on outside in the hall. No one knocks on the walls and demands for him to keep it down.

The entire world around him is dead and silent. The walls close in, so tightly that he still can’t draw any oxygen into his lungs.

And the lighter under his pillow feels like lead weighing him down to the floor—into the depths of the Earth, in the reality slowly constricting inside of him that all of this is real. It isn’t an elaborate nightmare.

Keith and Shiro are never coming back.

And he’ll just keep drowning here, without them, forever.

 

* * *

 

 

Something is going to happen tonight, he can feel it.

Throughout the last few months, after scaling the walls of the caverns, after photographing every strange pebble and every suspicious crack in the stone, Keith has collected enough data that he’s sure that he could recreate the entire desert in his sleep.

He’s crafted bombs from the various supplies that he’s swiped from the Garrison, mapped out a plan of action to infiltrate their defenses. He can sense it, deep within his chest, thrumming with his heart against his ribcage, combing through the edges of his thoughts—

Something is going to happen tonight, and it’s happening at the Galaxy Garrison.

The lion carvings whispered to him in his dreams. His cork board is jam-packed, marked with so many scribbles and tied with so much multi-colored string that his eyes are drawn in all directions. There’s an excitement here, vibrating in the air, clinging like the sweat to his skin.

And he tells himself that he isn’t hoping to do anything tonight but figure all of this out. He denies every mental accusation that he might be hoping to cross paths with any other students. One student in particular, he knows, but if he were to be completely honest with himself, maybe he would admit that he’d settle for one of Lance’s friends too.

He definitely isn’t wasting time thinking about what he would say and how he would say it. If he’d shove one of these stupid love letters that he’s stacked neatly in the corner of the cabin into their hands, begging them firmly, urgently,  _ “Please see that this gets to Lance. He needs to read it.” _

No, he definitely isn’t imagining some sickeningly sweet reunion—some dumb montage straight out of Lance’s ridiculous movies—in which Lance falls into his arms and holds him closer, whispers those sweet nothings into his ear, forgives him for all of his wrongdoings now that he can finally see that something is going on here, and Keith was the only person willing to uncover it.

It’s stupid, and he wouldn’t ever dream of wasting his time doing anything even remotely similar to that. And he can’t even imagine some lanky, awkward thing like Lance falling into his arms without floundering helplessly and missing by a few inches anyway. Surely, Lance would be more likely to flop right down to the ground, and even still, he’d find a way to blame that on Keith too.

_ “Well, maybe I’d be able to fall more romantically if you’d been around to teach me!” _

He can’t help but laugh, despite everything.

Lance would plummet straight down to the ground, just inches away from Keith’s outstretched arms. One of those comical, cartoonish dust clouds would erupt form the sand beneath him, but he’d be on his feet again in seconds. He’d be pointing that accusatory finger centimeters away from Keith’s nose, wagging it about as he ranted and raved about all of the cheesy tropes that the two of them had missed out on while Keith was away.

Keith would take him into his arms then, and he’d hold him so closely, as though he hasn’t forgotten how after spending so much time by himself. He’d kiss him then, soft and chaste—just like Lance had always wanted.

And he’d whisper, in a voice so gentle, so heavy with the love that’s never stopped swelling in his heart, all this time, _ “Leaving you was the worst thing I’ve ever done. Every day without you was harder than finding water in the desert, than hunting food in a land devoid of life, than living all of these agonizing months alone, never knowing if I’d live long enough to see you, ever again.” _

He shakes his head, cursing loudly through his teeth as he hurriedly forces himself to squash those horrible, intrusive thoughts.

He needs to stop allowing himself to get distracted. His focus now is crucial. He’s tuning up his hovercar, cleaning the old dirt stains and grease marks out of his clothes. He’s tearing apart one of his blankets to craft a handkerchief to mask his face—and he’s reading over his blueprints of the Galaxy Garrison, his photos of their security, his notes about their shift changes.

He’s been studying them for months without really understanding why.

But it all makes sense to him now. Or, at the very least, it feels like it should.

Because something is going to happen tonight. Something big, something explosive. Something that will hopefully uproot the ground beneath those sneaky bastards’ boots and bring them some much-needed restitution, once and for all.

In his mind’s eye, burned on the backs of his eyelids, he imagines Shiro’s smile, Lance’s guffaw of a laugh. He tries to remember how it must have felt to touch another person, tries to tell himself that he’s not allowing all of his stupid hopes to cloud his focus.

But he’s doing this for them. It’s _ always _ been for them. This has to make things better—for Lance, at the very least. This has to accomplish the kind of change that he couldn’t manage when he attempted to infiltrate the Garrison’s private offices to search for information.

That lapse of judgement still stings, even an entire year later. Iverson’s smug grin is burned into the back of his brain, those scathing words working nerves straight down into the depths of every single one of his muscles. He’d thought that he’d mapped out all of their security sensors. He’d thought that he’d memorized every hidden camera and every route that the night patrol took through the surrounding halls each night.

And he still isn’t sure what tipped them off. He still has no clue how they found him, just as his eyes were skimming over the photos of the suspiciously abandoned ship, the supplies, and the machines still whirring when the rescue crew managed to reach Kerberos in search of them.

There hadn’t ever been an announcement of a rescue crew. There hadn’t been any mention of the things that were recovered when they arrived.

And there definitely hadn’t been any word of the ship still rooted there, untouched, as though the crew had disappeared into thin air, leaving absolutely no trace of life, or a struggle, behind.

This was when the door at the other end of the room had slammed open. This was when two higher ranking officers—who Keith could swear he’d seen Shiro chatting with in the halls—had bounded across the room and grabbed him. 

And this was when Iverson had barked a horrible, bone chilling laugh, slamming a hand on the desk before drawing so close to Keith that his adrenaline had pumped hard and hot through his veins, itching for a fight.

_ “You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” _ He’d snarled, his canines sharp and bright as he’d sneered down at Keith, _ “Takashi Shirogane is dead. He failed as a pilot and it cost him his life, and the lives of his crewmates. You had a bright future ahead of you, and now you’ve thrown it all away—and for what? Chasing ghosts? Searching for answers that aren’t there—excuses that could possibly convince you that he wasn’t a failure? There’s no reason for any of this, cadet. There isn’t some magical, secret file that’s going to make all of this okay. He wasn’t poofed away by some witch! He wasn’t abducted by aliens! He just wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t the pilot that we thought he was, or the man who you thought he was. He died. None of this is going to bring him back. End of story.” _

Keith had spit in his face then.

He still isn’t sure if he’s proud of that or not.

But if he’d had any chance of not being expelled before that, Iverson definitely wasn’t feeling very charitable after. They’d given him barely enough time to go back to his room and collect his things, but there wasn’t anything worth going back for. There were uniforms that he’d never wear again, books that he’d thumbed through a hundred times before. There were only phantoms there, anymore—of nights spent alone with Shiro, of dreams of the three of them tucked in his blankets, of the moments that he’d spent hiding away from Lance’s affections, when he should have been smart enough to stay close to him when he still could.

But there was a lighter in his pocket. There was a dorm room just a hall away from his own that he knew he could break into if he needed to.

And it hadn’t been hard, with all of the skills that he’d perfected to sneak into the confidential offices, to force his way into a sleeping boy’s room.

But it had been nearly impossible to bury the lighter under some papers on Lance’s desk and slink away without waking him up. It had been difficult not to shake him under the covers, to kiss him and cry, to beg him to come along as well.

It had been the hardest thing he’d ever done, leaving Lance without explaining everything.

But he’d had a bright future ahead of him—Iverson had said it himself—and he’d smothered that flame without a single thought. He’d stared down at Lance’s sleeping face in the dark, as time slowed down, as the world around him felt suddenly colder and smaller, more constricting than it had ever felt before. He’d felt then, as though his own life had been splintered off into two very distinct paths—and neither of them ended quite the way that he wanted them to. Neither of them ended with both himself and Lance living happily ever after.

He could drag Lance along with him, into the barren wilderness that rolled out for countless miles beyond the compound. He could force him into a meaningless, uphill struggle of a life. He could ask Lance to leave everything behind, just for the inkling of a doubt that he still had that Shiro hadn’t caused his own demise. That somewhere out there, he was still alive, and the two of them could ever be capable of saving him.

Or he could leave Lance in his bed, allow him sleep through the night. He could do Lance the first favor that he’d ever done for him—the one selfless thing that he’d ever done in his life. He could break Lance’s heart, but he could save him—from the desert outside, from an unknown future, from himself.

And he’d left Lance there, because it was better that way. That’s what he’d thought at the time. Lance would find the lighter. He’d know what it meant.

And even if he didn’t, and he misunderstood, it was for the best. If Lance hated him, if he blamed him for going away, maybe he’d find it easier to move on.

Maybe then, he’d be able to live a normal life. He’d be able to find someone else, to fall in love again—but with someone better. With someone who deserved him, like Shiro did.

It’s been a year since that night, but he can never shake the image of Lance’s sleeping face from his thoughts. He can never manage to stop himself from wondering if Lance would have come with him if he’d woken him up and asked.

But tonight, maybe, he can make amends for that.

Tonight, maybe, everything will change.

He tells himself this, as he’s packing everything that he needs onto his hovercar. As he’s cupping a hand over his eyes and peering out into the wide, endless sky.

It looks as though it might rain later in the afternoon, but his experience with the desert out here tells him otherwise. The sky is heavy with clouds, overcast and gray.

It’s the same dark, stormy hue as Shiro’s eyes.

The lion carvings call out to him. He feels something, something that he can’t possibly understand. He’s drawn into action like a marionette by its strings, tossed in all directions by the forces that bind him to this place and his stupid, selfish memories boiling in his heart.

But tonight, he can feel it, everything is going to change.

He just hopes that it’s for the better.

That in some way, somehow, maybe he can see Lance again.

He still doesn’t know what he would say to Lance, what he would do, how he would feel.

But just as strong as the lion carvings, just as strong as the undeniable force that’s always beckoned him into the sky, he can’t ignore it.

Not one bit. Not even if he tried.

 

* * *

 

 

Iverson is yelling so close to his face that he can feel small specks of spit hitting his cheeks.

Lance flinches away from him, just a bit. He’s never been in a position like this before. He’s never been chastised so harshly, in front of such a large group of silent onlookers. No one has ever insulted him so rudely, picked him apart with no regard for his sensitivities, and no one has ever been so cruel as to actually  _ spit on him _ . For a moment, he feels the flickers of anger fanning in his chest, as he wonders if Iverson knows how this sort of thing feels. If he could possibly understand how belittling it is to be talked down to, or if anyone has ever had the gall to actually spit on him, too.

But the anger is flushed out by horror, as he wonders, panicked, if Iverson will smell his weakness and hound him for that as well. That he’ll tell him,  _ “Even the cadet who vacated your place didn’t shy away when he was being reprimanded! How do you expect to pilot an entire crew if you can’t even handle a little criticism?!” _

He wonders if Iverson ever yelled at Keith like this.

It’s not likely. He was too talented, too diligent. He was too quiet, too—a perfect, silent student. Just the right kind of clay that the Garrison could have molded into anything that they’d wanted for him to be.

But he wonders who must have yelled at him before—who must have taught him to flinch away when someone touched him, who must have trained him to fear contact before he accepted it.

He wonders where Keith learned to overreact like he did over a year ago in the locker room shower, when Lance had only been trying to touch his hair. He wonders where that fear had come from, who had trained him to stay on such high alert at all times, even when the Garrison was surely hundreds of miles away from all of those horrible people who had hurt him.

He wonders if Shiro knew any of those people by name, if he could have picked them out in a crowd. If he understood the reasons why Keith acted how he did, and if maybe he’d understood what Lance had never been smart enough to see—that there was no fixing what had happened to Keith. There was no changing the way that he was. They could only give him room to grow his stunted growth, to make the best of the life that he’d been given and move on as well as he could.

He wonders, if maybe, Shiro could have stopped Keith from leaving. If he could have done something or said something that would have made everything okay.  

And he wonders if maybe those secrets are buried in the sky now, in the endless vacuum where Shiro’s body will be frozen forever, until the end of time.

He feels dead inside.

Pidge lashes out then, like the firecracker that he is. He’s baring his teeth like a rabid chihuahua, fists trembling at his sides as he challenges Iverson’s assessment of the Kerberos mission. He’s vibrating with his anger, and Lance doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t understand the passion. He doesn’t understand the rage.

He can’t imagine caring so much about anything anymore—feeling strongly about the ghosts floating somewhere far off in the stars, as though somehow, they might ever figure out that the Garrison has labeled them as a bunch of failures.

But he’s quick to defend Pidge anyway, because he knows that Pidge doesn’t understand anything either. He doesn’t know how this place works yet, doesn’t realize that he’ll get nowhere if he questions authority, if he voices his opinions, if he searches for answers why.

He’ll end up just like Keith—baking somewhere out there in the desert sun, erased from the Garrison’s record books. A cautionary tale without a name, a phantom who no one cares enough to search for anymore.

Shiro’s mom never called him back. When he’d called her, weeks after her initial visit, her secretary had told him that she’d be in touch, but he’d never heard from her again. He wonders if the Garrison stepped in, but no one said anything to him. They hadn’t been suspicious when he’d filed for a measly three hour trip into the town nearby. They hadn’t acted as though anything was awry when he’d returned earlier than scheduled.

He wonders if maybe she’d just given up. If she’d accepted that Shiro was dead, no matter what she did. If she’d decided that Keith wasn’t worth it, if maybe the mysteries surrounding the Galaxy Garrison were too harrowing for one woman to take on alone.

He claps a hand over Pidge’s mouth, drawing him close. He doesn’t care that Shiro’s mom never called back. He never tried to get in touch with her again. He’d allowed that hope to die quickly—convinced himself that it was better if he just stopped chasing leads. If he allowed himself to accept the fact that nothing could ever bring Shiro back to life, nothing could ever make Keith love him enough to stay.

The motions are better. Pretending is better. He doesn’t need to hope anymore. He doesn’t need to feel anything. He just needs to stop Pidge from getting himself expelled too. He needs to make sure that someone else doesn’t take Pidge’s place—another fresh-faced, naive cadet who might think that Lance is anything but a failure filling a prodigy's shoes. Someone who will lead them to ruin. Someone who mangles every fragile thing that he touches.

For a moment, he worries that Pidge might lick his hand. It’s what he would do, anyway, but he risks it just to shut him up, mutters a short series of excuses.

Iverson lurches forward, his shoulders squared and his arms straight, his fists tight at his sides. He draws nearer until he’s just inches away from Lance’s face—his single open eye peering straight into Lance, unforgiving and unapologetic. Cold and hard and everything that Lance thinks that he might be inside.

“I hope I don’t need to remind you, that the only reason you’re here is that the best pilot in your class had a discipline issue and flunked out. _ Don’t _ follow in his footsteps.”

It strikes something sharp into the pits of Lance’s heart. It shoves his pulse straight into his throat. And he swallows desperately, sweat beading at his brow. His mind uncoils—running through the memories like a strip of old film: Keith’s small smile, Keith’s strange laugh. Keith’s terrifying talent and his fiery temper. His determination. His unshakable love and devotion.

The reverberation of his voice as he’d bellowed at Lance, alone together in the wake of Shiro’s death.

His empty desk in their shared classroom.

His footprints brushed over in desert sand.

Keith’s lighter heavy in his pocket.

Iverson compiles thousands of memories into one single sentence—an afterthought, an insult. He turns away as though he’s said nothing, as though Lance should get over it. As though none of this means anything.

And the moment ends, the next group moves toward the simulator.

Class drags on.

He wonders, wryly, what Iverson would have said to him, if he’d interrupted his tirade just to explain why he always fails. If he came clean, once and for all, and admitted to him, and everyone listening dutifully around them, _ “I panic when I see the pilots waving back at me on Kerberos. It makes me wonder if they’re really out there in real life, if Keith was right. If I’m just sitting here doing nothing while Shiro’s running out of oxygen. And I don’t know what I’d do if you sick fucks actually made the pilot look like him. I’m too terrified to see if you did. I couldn’t face him after I let him down. I couldn’t look at him smiling at me, just like he used to, without realizing that I let Keith get away. That I fucked everything up, just like I knew I would. Just like Keith knew I would when he left me behind.” _

He’ll deny that he’s still thinking about it if Hunk asks later on, when class ends and night falls, and the final warning bells ring out through the halls. He’ll deny that he’s suggesting sneaking out because he’s feeling reckless now—that he’s feeling like, maybe, he should be more like Keith. He’ll tell Hunk that he just wants to bond more with his team, that maybe they need to take Iverson’s words to heart and get to know each other better, in their own way.

Hunk doesn’t need to know that he’s wondering what Iverson would say about him, if he followed in Keith’s footsteps. If he’d look disappointed, or if maybe he’d be relieved. Lance hasn’t exactly wowed his commanders like he’d always thought that he would.

He hasn’t exactly been focusing on schoolwork anymore.

He spends a lot of his days on the balcony, overlooking the compound. He spends a lot of time flicking Keith’s lighter on and off, imagining what it might feel like to float around in space, how it would feel to die weightless, surrounded by so much black.

He spends his time wondering what Keith got expelled for, and how Iverson must have looked when he’d expelled him. He wonders if Keith had begged for forgiveness, or if he fought tooth and nail to the very end. He wonders if Shiro would be disappointed if he ever had a way of finding out.

And he wonders if they’ll ever send another crew out to recover the ship, or if maybe they’ve changed the simulation to mirror exactly what their next big mission will be.

So maybe he should be paying more attention. But why? What would he do if he took the same route as Shiro, to the same place? What would he do once he reached the rotting skeleton of Shiro’s old ship, collected all of the tech that Shiro must have used every day, settled into the skin of Shiro’s biggest voyage just like he’s settled into Keith’s?

What would he do if he traveled all the way out to Kerberos, and there really was no Shiro?

How would he feel?

He’d be better off ditching school and searching for Keith’s bones in the desert. He’d be better off just keeping his head down and slowly crawling through the rest of his time here.

Hunk is nervous about sneaking out, but he comes along anyway. He’s been reliable through all of this, so much better than Lance could ever deserve. Some days, he resists the urge to shake Hunk, to yell at him and belittle him until he finally realizes what a sinkhole Lance is. Until he finally accepts the fact that he’ll get nowhere if he keeps following along, keeps coddling him, keeps culminating this belief inside of himself that Lance is going to get better, and all of this will pass in time.

He’s branded now, by everything that’s happened. He’s so different that he barely recognizes himself in the mirror anymore. When he brushes his teeth every morning and night, he can’t meet his own eyes in his reflection. He doesn’t know the person who looks back at him—he doesn’t know how he’ll ever face his family as this stranger. He doesn’t know why Hunk still treats him like he isn’t a body snatcher living in borrowed skin.

But tonight, he allows Hunk to humor him. He resists the urge to tell him to go back to his room. He pretends that everything is normal, he’s just being rebellious for fun. He isn’t being reckless for the sake of feeling alive.

He isn’t setting them up to get in trouble just to see how hard he can push this place before they throw him out, just like they did to Keith.

Pidge is leaving his room when they round the corner. They tuck themselves away in the shadows, muttering about his motives as he locks his door. The lighter feels heavier in Lance’s pocket. It feels ice cold, pressed against his leg. All day, he hasn’t been able to shake this feeling that something is just about to happen. He hasn’t been able to ignore the electricity popping just under his skin.

And he feels like all of this is related now—Pidge sneaking out, the Kerberos mission in the simulations, Keith’s suspicious disappearance, and even Iverson’s terrible attitude.

Hunk claims that he wants to turn back, but he still follows Lance when he ducks around the corner. They trail behind Pidge on a winding, calculated trip up to the roof.

He tries not to feel too cocky when he watches Pidge punching in the key code that he gave him months ago to that door. He tries to stay as quiet and small as possible, until they’re creeping up behind Pidge, artfully undetected until the moment that he reaches forward and plucks one of those oversized headphones from Pidge’s ear.

“You come up here to rock out?”

Pidge is shaken, for the first time that he’s ever seen. He tries not to feel too cocky about that either.

And they’re standing here, talking about Pidge’s inane theories—about some alien weapon, about aliens radio chatter, about the same sort of tinfoil hat nonsense that Lance imagines might really get Keith going.

Pidge seems determined that some made up word is going to summon aliens to Earth. He’s very adamant that all of this is going to happen tonight. Lance shakes off his nerves, telling himself that it’s all a coincidence. This has nothing to do with his eerie feeling that some kind of force, or fate, or other ridiculous nonsense is going to shake his entire world tonight. This has nothing to do with Keith’s disappearance. This has nothing to do with Kerberos’s failure or Shiro’s untimely death.

He calls Pidge crazy, because  _ all of this _ feels crazy. And it makes him feel better, for a moment, when he reassures himself that conspiracies are only for lunatics. That there’s no secret information buried somewhere deep behind tightly locked doors in the Garrison offices. That Keith was wrong, Shiro’s mom was wrong, and this entire last year was just a long series of horrible events that were no one’s fault—and anyone who can’t accept that just needs to get real and move on.

They’re bickering about this when the sky bursts with light, when something big and fast and so undeniably  _ alien _ tumbles down through the atmosphere.

And time isn’t static after this.

Time is a strange, skittering thing. It’s lightning fast as he watches the asteroid or the ship or whatever it might be, crashing down to the ground. It’s slow-motion as he watches Garrison soldiers nearing the fiery crater that it leaves in the Earth.

And it follows his pulse after that—quick for a moment, slow another. Bumping along at such an inconsistent speed that he can barely keep up with himself, when he snatches the binoculars from Pidge’s hands to get a better look.

Soldiers are guarding the entrance of a tented-off building, just a few miles away. Doctors and scientists in hazmat suits are filing in. They’ve collected something from the crater that he can’t make out. They’ve zipped it up into a body bag, and they’re moving so quickly that he can barely keep up with them.

He’s running to the other side of the roof for an even better view. He’s flying forward, so fast that the world around him spins. He’s shaking so hard that he can barely stay upright, then he’s standing terribly still—watching everything unfold in front of him, and wondering why he feels so sick.

Wondering why all of this somehow feels as though it might mean something. As though somehow, he’s been waiting for this moment all this time—since Keith left without warning, since Shiro died. As though somehow this is all just one final piece of a big puzzle that he never knew he was struggling to put together.

Pidge announces that he’s hacked their video feed, and he doesn’t even take a moment to appreciate his quick thinking or how smart he is, even among all of this confusion and excitement. He just knows that he needs to see whatever they’re hiding inside. He needs to understand what all of this means.

He needs to know why all of this feels so important.

Why it feels, suddenly, as though everything happening right now is nothing short of life and death.

The screen crackles to life. For a moment, it shudders, as glitchy lines vibrate over the image of a clean, white room. There are medical tables strewn about, all shoved together haphazardly in the corner, to make space for the dozen or so doctors surrounding a single table, and the fuzzy figure strapped down to it who slowly begins to come to life.

At first, the mingle of many voices speaking at once distracts him. His mind is buzzing with too many thoughts, dumbed down with the high of adrenaline that he still hasn’t come down from. He’s trembling hard, sandwiched between Pidge and Hunk as he crouches down for clearer view. The figure on the table seems to be waking up. They pull at their straps helplessly. Pidge zooms in as closely on their face as his tech can handle.

The man strapped down to the table on the screen is a stranger. He’s a broad-shouldered, chiseled thing. He’s so big that the cords around his arms are pulled tight beneath their mass. He’s pale and he’s scared—a trapped animal, howling for its life. His faded hair brushes over the deep scar across his face. His eyes widen in terror.

Lance feels his dinner crawling around in his belly.

The final piece of the proverbial puzzle in his head clicks into place.

It’s Shiro.

He can’t breathe. He can’t think. His eyes are so wide that he worries that they might fall out of his head. He’s shaking so hard that he wonders, if he weren’t smashed so tightly between Pidge and Hunk, if he’d vibrate straight off of the edge of the roof.

_ It’s Shiro. _

It’s undeniable. Despite the rags of clothes, despite the paleness of his skin. Despite the scars, or the faded hair, the terror in his eyes that Lance has never seen before. He’s begging them to listen. He’s pleading for them to pay attention. They’re ignoring him, completely. They’re poking him and prodding him as though he isn’t a human being.

They’re shoving random hand-held machines into his face, commenting on the numbers that mean nothing to Lance. Shiro is still yelling, still begging, still pulling at his bindings.

Lance feels as though he’s falling straight into the atmosphere. He feels as though the world around him is weightless and directionless, as though the sky is rolling out around him, and the stars and galaxies sleeping far beyond it are threatening to open up and swallow him whole.

This isn’t real. It can’t be real.

Keith was right.

Shiro is alive.

_ “Sir look at this—” _

_ “It appears his arm has been replaced with a cyborg prosthetic—” _

The world is a kaleidoscope of colors, swirling around him. He can feel the contents of his belly pressing up into his throat. He’s dizzy, intoxicated on this moment. He feels like he’s in a dream.

Shiro is scared on the screen, he can see it. Shiro has changed so much.

He’s yelling and he’s struggling. He’s still pleading for these people to hear him. Lance can hear himself talking, but he can’t understand his own words. He doesn’t understand any of this. He doesn’t know what’s going on.

But they need to get in there. They need to save Shiro.

They need to  _ move _ .

“We need a distraction,” is what he hears himself say.

No one is treating him as though he’s acting strangely, and he doesn’t understand it. Can they see how fast his thoughts are racing? Can they hear his heart pounding from where they sit?

Explosions burst just over the cliffside.

Time staggers forward—fast, slow, fast, slow. Light bursts in spots before his eyes.

Hunk is yelling and Pidge sounds like he’s cheering, as though this might be the best moment of his life.

“Those explosions were a distraction, for _ him _ !”

It’s reflexive, when he puts the binoculars to his eyes. It’s a thoughtless action, and for a moment, he wishes that he hadn’t done it.

Because he sees the figure jumping from a hovercar just a little too soon for his comfort. He feels the cords in his heart pulling tighter, tangling together. And his lungs are useless, his veins go cold.

It’s Keith.

He’s alive.

_ He’s here. _

He’s running towards Shiro, and Lance almost laughs. He almost cackles at the absurdity of it all—how predictable of a fool Keith really is, how he’s stayed away for so long until finally, he’s found Shiro. How his mind is such a single track, how Lance could have ever hoped that maybe he’d come to find him someday, but Keith has obviously just been waiting for this one chance to return.

And he’s so angry that he could scream—which he does, he thinks. He can barely hear the crack of his own voice, but he can feel it tearing through his throat. The razor blades of his words rip him up inside. The heat of his anger cauterizes the wounds, and sears them open again. He’s a feedback loop of emotions—anger into sadness into mourning into anger. He’s Schrodinger's hopeless idiot in love—hating Keith and loving him all at once, and he’s too terrified to peer inside of himself and figure out which one it is right now.

He’s running towards Keith, towards Shiro, towards that terrible little bubble with those horrible tables, those awful straps, holding Shiro down.

To Shiro, to Keith.

To the end of this miserable stretch of time without them.

To the end of all of this.

 

* * *

 

 

As it is with many things, once Keith finally manages to infiltrate the Galaxy Garrison’s defenses, it seems a lot easier to do than he would have originally thought.

He’d set off some explosives, veered around the cliffside hastily and leapt from his hovercar just as it came close enough to the ground. The run hadn’t felt like much of anything either—not after spending so many days travelling in the desert heat, not after dragging boxes and boxes of stolen goods back to his cabin in the middle of the night.

It hadn’t been a long run, not really. Not with his pulse pounding in his ears, not with his adrenaline skyrocketed and pumping like acid in his veins. He’d felt in that moment as though he would die if he stopped moving forward. As though the world around him would collapse into the bleary confusion of another bad dream if he so much as doubted his ability to do this right.

He makes easy work of the doctors. They barely put up a fight.

But the face of the man tied down to the medical table is what finally stops him.

The stress-faded hair, the frightfully pale skin. The tightly-drawn brows and the wide, deep-set scar dragged out over hollowed cheeks.

He’s different, but he’s Shiro.

He’s bigger and stronger, washed out and creased like all of the silly love letters on Keith’s desk in his shack—but it’s Shiro.

He can barely find the strength to breathe.

Shiro is heavier and far more awkward than any Garrison-approved packing boxes, as he cuts him loose and slings him over his shoulder. He’s warmer than any computers or canned goods that Keith’s sneaked out of the storage sheds. He’s no longer soft or smooth, like he used to be. He’s paler now, faded like old photographs, and he smells like blood.

Like the bitter bite of copper. Like the old, curled edges of memories flooding back into his mind—of the stuffy hospital where they’d taken him once his dad disappeared. Of orphanage playgrounds, of knuckles like spears cracking against his face.

Like Lance howling at him in the fog of the Garrison locker room.

Like the black stains of old wounds caked on his sleeves.

He shakes away those thoughts, compartmentalizing them for somewhere further down the road. He has the rest of his life to grapple with old trauma, he tells himself. But he only has right now—this very moment, that’s slipping so quickly through his fingers—to get Shiro as far away from this terrible place as he can.

He doesn’t get the chance to formulate a plan. He doesn’t get the chance to figure out how he’s going to manage to carry Shiro, already feeling entirely too heavy in his arms, all the way across the courtyard to his hovercar and keep him steady until they make it back to the safety of his shack.

He doesn’t even get a moment to think, because there’s a crashing just across the room that tears his attention away. In a single breath, he readies himself for a fight with security.

But it’s Lance who stumbles into the room, shoving a medical table to the side, traipsing forward with those long, skinny legs. Wagging a finger in the air, just like Keith always imagined that he would, if they got to meet again, face to face.

He sputters incoherently for a split second, before he finally manages to get close enough that he can lean forward and look Keith in the eyes.

They’re barely two feet apart, and Lance is shaking.

He’s red-faced and angry—so angry that, for a moment, Keith isn’t sure if he’ll be able to muster the will to speak at all.

But he manages, barely. His voice is high-pitched and squeaky. His shoulders round forward as he reaches into his pocket and fumbles around, struggling to find  _ something _ in his rage.

“You are  _ not _ allowed to come back here after all this time and just  _ save the day _ !”

He’s stalking closer, but suddenly, he stops. He’s pulled his pocket inside out in his haste, but he doesn’t pause to fix it. Keith’s mouth feels far too slack to say anything. His eyes are rounded and wide. He shifts ever-so slightly, redistributing Shiro’s weight, wondering with a pang of annoyance in his chest if they really need to do this right now, and not later on when they aren’t in immediate danger.

“Y-you can’t just leave and—and come back for only him!” Lance screeches, taking a split second to glare at whatever he’s pulled out of his pocket before launching it forward, “You can’t just leave me behind and expect me to let you take him away from me too!”

Keith doesn’t have the free hands or the range of movement to dodge Lance’s projectile. He flinches backwards to the best of his ability, but it still hits him hard, just at the apple of his cheek.

He can see it glinting in the light as it falls down to the floor. He can hear the metallic clattering of it as it finally makes contact with the linoleum.  

The pain that it leaves behind is dulled, as he watches Lance staring at him—as he takes in the wideness of his eyes, the color on his cheeks. The tears welling up and the quivering of his lips that are hard to look at for very long.

So he looks away from Lance, because it’s impossible to hold that gaze. He feels like he’s burning here, from the inside out. He feels like he’s already squandered this opportunity to apologize before he’s even gotten the chance to open his mouth.

He knows what Lance threw at him even before his eyes even find it on the floor. He can feel the dread and the old, fermented guilt, the self-hatred and the aggravating mourning boiling in his belly as his gaze makes the slow journey from Lance, still raving, to his tiny weapon, staring at him silently—a small, painful reminder of all of the ways that he’s mangled this relationship beyond repair.

It’s the lighter, he knows.

The inscription is facing upwards, those words branding themselves, all over again, on the inner walls of his heart.

_ “You light my fire.” _

He’s such an idiot.

Shiro slumps forward, groaning softly as Keith struggles to slouch down and grab the lighter. Lance watches him with owlish eyes, as though he’s just done the worst thing that he could have possibly done.

Keith bites off a growl, readjusting Shiro and putting on his most convincing annoyed frown.

“Are you finished?” he asks, clipped and short, the perfect armor against Lance’s anger and ridiculous ability to peer inside of him and see exactly what he’s feeling when he doesn’t want him to, “Can I go? Because, you know, I’m kind of on a strict schedule here. Or… were you waiting for the Commanders to show up so they could lock Shiro up somewhere?”

It’s horrible and cruel, but Lance barely reacts. If anything, he seems eager to resume these tired roles. To keep on pretending that Keith is out to get him, after everything they’ve been through.

And Keith finds, with more guilt than he can understand, that he’s eager to keep pretending too.

Even still, after all this time, he wants Lance to hate him.

He wants Lance to see Shiro here, suffering, tortured. And he wants for him to realize that this is what happens when a person is stupid enough to love someone like Keith. He wants him to finally understand that the nicest thing Keith ever did for him was ditch him, and he’s sure as Hell not going to ruin that one selfless act by allowing him back into his life now.

Lance needs to hate him. He needs to go back into the school.

He needs to live a good, simple life, and die without any regrets.

He needs to realize that Keith loves him too much to keep ruining him.

“I’m _ not _ done,” Lance cuts in, lurching ever-closer, until he’s so close that Keith could kiss him, if he really wanted to (which he doesn’t, not right now, never again), “You’re not taking him anywhere without me.”

He grasps Shiro’s other arm, slinging it over his shoulder. Keith tries to convince himself that it isn’t much easier when they move forward, carrying Shiro with an ease that he swears to himself that he could have had just fine without Lance helping him.

He tells himself that he’ll make Lance go back to the Garrison once Shiro is safe. He’s not going to let this get out of control. He’s not going to allow Lance to throw away his future. He’s not going to make this harder on all of them than it needs to be.

There are other people in the room now. Lance’s friend, who he barely remembers, and another person, who—

He shakes his head, pushing those thoughts away.

Matt might not be dead, but he isn’t here. As much as that kid might look like him, it’s not worth wondering about. It’s not worth worrying about the Holts when Shiro is in such immediate danger.

They move out of his way as he comes closer. The big guy is staring at him venomously, but he doesn’t have time to worry about it. He can feel Lance’s body heat so close to him now, when they bump together awkwardly, tripping over Shiro’s legs. When they manage to find a comfortable pace, a safe speed, and a shorter route back to his hovercar.

The lighter feels cold in his pocket, tucked up against his leg. It feels as though it’s filling a small hole inside of him that he hasn’t noticed in months.

Lance mutters moodily as they hoist Shiro onto his hovercar, and the group of them together barely fit. He doesn’t understand why any of these people care about helping so much. Why they’re so willing to run away from this place without a second thought.

Bitterly, he wonders where this level of commitment was nearly a year ago when Shiro disappeared—why Lance wasn’t readily willing to leave this awful place behind and brave the unforgiving desert, by his side.

It’s not fair, but his heart thrums with all of these angry thoughts nonetheless. He knows now, that Lance would have come with him. He would have abandoned his comfortable life without a second thought.

And it’s dangerous, this realization. It’s a horrible, overwhelming epiphany—that Lance would follow him anywhere, do anything, if it meant that they three of them could stay together.

He can feel Lance shuffling around just behind him, struggling to find a comfortable place to hold on. He’s so close—with those long, bony arms. With those miles and miles of shapely legs, the firm thighs, the warm lips. The beautiful, time-stilling smile. The musical laughter that he hasn’t heard in over a year.

The soft, loving words that still keep him up late at night.

But that part of his life is over, he knows. That version of himself and Lance—where they’re happy together, where they’re comfortable together, where they trust each other and nothing could ever tear them apart—it’s gone. It’s dead and it’s buried.

He’s ruined everything. He’s purposefully, tactfully butchered their relationship beyond repair.

Lance, he’s sure, will never want to talk to him again. Not after he gets his own feelings of abandonment off of his chest. Not once he makes sure that Shiro is safe and sound, and surely, begins figuring out how the two of them can leave Keith behind.

Lance will never forgive him, and very soon, Shiro will awaken and find out what he’s done.

He’ll discover that Keith couldn’t even keep one single promise—to do well at the Garrison, to become a successful pilot. To find contentment in his absence, to take care of Lance.

To be happy.

He couldn’t do any of it, not when Shiro wasn’t around. Not when he was floating out there, somewhere, in the depths of space and no one else was willing to figure out what happened.

Shiro will be disappointed. And after so many years, he’ll finally figure out what a lost cause Keith really is.

He’ll leave—just like he did before, just like his mom, just like his dad.

He’ll leave, and he’ll take Lance, and Keith will be alone, just like he always has been, just like he’d always expected.

But it doesn’t matter, not anymore.

Because now, Shiro is safe.

Shiro is safe, and that’s all that he will allow himself to care about.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello there! Happy Thursday! Currently, I am out of town, but my lovely beta is posting this chapter for me. A big, big thanks to them again. Honestly, I can’t even imagine how many times this story would have to be put on hold without them.  
> That being said, this chapter was kind of long in comparison to the others, wasn’t it? Shhh, I won’t tell if you won’t. Just roll with it. It’s totally fine.  
> Anyway, thank you so much for reading! See you again next week!


	29. The Crayfish and the Crab

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith runs away, Lance pushes the envelope. And Shiro comes along for the ride.

Keith has banished himself to the yard—or, at the very least, the small space just outside of his shack that he’s come to consider to be the desert equivalent of a yard—as everyone else crowds together inside and prepares themselves for the few hours of rest that they can squeeze out of the night before sunrise.

He busies himself with doing small repairs to his hovercar after pushing it so much harder than he would have thought, previous to the last few hours, that it could have handled. He’d thought that one or two supply boxes was pushing it, and actually managing to drag Shiro back to his shack alone seemed like it might have taken a miracle, but it’s proven itself to be more durable than he ever would have given it credit for. Carrying himself, and four other people, winding at full speed over dangerous terrain and taking a sudden plunge down a steep cliff side into the mouth of the valley below. He feels as though it deserves a little bit of TLC after all of that. That maybe, he owes it as much as an oil change and a clean up.

It isn’t terribly bent out of shape, but he fiddles with the controls for good measure, wipes away the excess dust and the mud collecting in the air vents. He decides, in a moment of desperation, that he might as well throw a tarp over it as well.

He might as well do as many chores as he possibly can now, since going inside and facing Lance is absolutely the last thing that he would ever consider doing, after everything that’s happened tonight. So he makes a mental list of everything that he’s been avoiding for the last few months—wiping the dust away from the cracked shingles lining his shack, sweeping out the inside of his storage shed, wiping the dirt from the indentations of the bottoms of his boots, and finally stabbing a stick into the cobwebby corners of the roof to clear the mess away.

The list grows, the more that he gets done. He’s sweeping the loose sand from the  _ denser  _ sand around the backdoor of the shed. He’s on his hands and knees, searching diligently under the porch for a rare weed to uproot—because God forbid any visitors witness an unkempt yard around his rotting bones of a house. God forbid any of his guests think less of him, as he hides away like a coward, after Lance has surely spent the majority of the night explaining to them what a pathetic excuse for a boyfriend, and a human being, he really is.

He can already imagine it, perfectly clear—Lance at the mouth of their small group, retelling the tired tale of their breakup like a ghost story over a campfire. He’d wave his hands about at the right intervals, drag those shocked gasps and whispers from their trembling lips.

_ “And then…” _ his voice would taper off into a whisper. He’d crouch forward, readying himself to spring to his feet and spook them at just the right moment. _ “He left… the lighter!” _

Fingers like claws, teeth bared like a monster leaping out from the darkness under a child’s bed, Lance would revel in the screams that would bellow out around him, relieved, for surely the first time in a year, that everyone was finally well aware of how little Keith deserved their pity or admiration.

Reassuring them, no, he would never imagine forgiving such a deadbeat lover as Keith.

If the future winding out in front of him didn’t feel so painfully, embarrassingly bleak, Keith might feel like laughing right now.

This definitely wasn’t the reunion that he’d been hoping for, but maybe it was the one that he should have expected. The one that he really deserved.

Lance, in all of his accusations and all of his unfounded claims that Keith himself is the hot-headed one, is truly a wildcard. A firecracker, even, when he really wants to be.

He pauses now, rubbing a filthy hand over the aching spot on his cheek. Lance had been very angry with him earlier. He’d been shaking harder than Keith had ever seen him shake before.

Which is saying a lot, he thinks, with a wry smile cracking open his lips. He’s made Lance angry so many times since they met, so many more than he could possibly hope to count. But even when Lance was wailing at him in the library or punching him in the locker room, he’s never seen him look so mad that he couldn’t even  _ move _ .

At least, for the small stretch of time before he’d belted that lighter at his head.

He’s never played catch with anyone in his life. He’s never had to prepare himself for a projectile flying at neck breaking speed, straight towards his own face.

And yes, maybe it’s still pretty funny. Maybe, if he’d been standing outside of himself, he might have laughed so hard at the sight of it that he’d be inconsolable now.

How Lance had run into that lab, pushing one of the medical tables to the side. How he’d fumbled with his words and stabbed his finger in the air, how his voice had cracked just like it used to. How, at first, it had seemed like just another one of their old fights. How he’d instinctively played the same, tired role that he’s always played—of the disgruntled recipient. Of the bad guy, far too good for any of Lance’s raving. 

How easy it had been to slip back into that same position. How, for a moment, it hadn’t seemed as though any time had passed between them.

How maybe, for a brief, pathetic, selfish moment, he’d convinced himself that everything was okay. Lance wasn’t mad at him. Nothing was different, he hadn’t ruined everything.

But then Lance had reached into his pocket and pulled out that stupid lighter.

And he’d thrown it right at Keith’s face.

_ “You are not allowed to come back here after all this time and just save the day!” _

He’d howled like a wounded animal.

_ “You can’t just leave me behind and expect me to let you take him away from me too!” _

His eyes had been glassy and wide. His shoulders had trembled with a mountainous sadness, in place of the expected rage.

And that’s when it had stopped being funny. That’s when Keith had swallowed his anger, when he’d scooped the lighter from the floor and ignored the painful pulsing where it had hit him in the face.

It was awkward, with Shiro’s unconscious body slumped over his shoulder. He didn’t have the strength to carry Shiro and also to fight back. He’d stood there uselessly, like he was a little kid again. He’d stared hard at the floor between his feet.

He couldn’t look Lance in the eye in that moment. All of the excuses that he’d spent months crafting together had died right then on his tongue.

He didn’t know what to say, as always, like a fool.

And even now, he still grapples with the words that could possibly make all of this okay.

He isn’t sure how he feels about any of it—about Lance being angry, about the idea that Lance had found him at a bad moment, and hadn’t given him the chance to explain. He knows how it must have looked, as though he’d ditched Lance and only cared about finding Shiro. As though, without Shiro, Keith really hadn’t seen any point in them staying together anymore.

And he knows, he said that himself, loud and clear. But he also knows that he didn’t mean it, not a bit, and that Lance, unfortunately, can’t read his mind. He’d have no way of ever understanding how untrue those horrible accusations had been. He couldn’t just assume that Keith ever said things that he didn’t mean. He couldn’t comprehend that even Keith—in all of his awkward bluntness, with all of the times that he speaks his mind at the wrong time—sometimes lies. And sometimes he says things just because they’re the meanest things to say.

Sometimes, even Keith just wants people to hurt how he’s hurting.

And no matter how much he hates that part of himself, he knows that Lance wouldn’t believe it for even a second. Even though it’s the truth.

Because after all this time, Lance carried that torch. He kept the lighter. He’d looked out for any sign that Keith was coming back. He must have been on that rooftop when Shiro crashed down to Earth. He must have watched the entire thing unfolding with baited breath, and only leaped into action when he’d seen Keith barreling straight into the calamity.

And he doesn’t know why Lance would keep the lighter.

He doesn’t understand why Lance wouldn’t just let it go and move on.

He can’t, for the life of him, possibly understand what could have seemed so worthwhile for Lance to keep hoping that he’d come back—as though he could ever be the kind of person worth waiting for. As though he could ever hope to be even a fraction as charming, or handsome, or romantic as someone like Lance deserves.

It’s frustrating, how stupid Lance is.

How he’s such a moron that he can’t even realize that he’s one of the best people who Keith has ever met.

How, just like Shiro, he’s too good for any of this. He deserves more than someone like Keith, who will only continue to hurt him and let him down, again and again.

But even still, Keith can’t help but hope that Lance can forgive him, somehow. That maybe they’ll finally get the chance to talk, that Keith can explain himself. That they can have the heart-to-heart that he kept dreaming of, and maybe Keith could give him those love letters.

Maybe he could tell Lance about all of the weird stuff that he’s found out here, since he’s been away—the lion carvings in the caverns that call out to him in his dreams, the wind whistling through this barren wasteland that still sounds like moaning when it wakes him up in the middle of the night, or how curiously empty his heart has felt, like it’s never felt before. As though all that’s left of it is like the last drink of water in the bottom of his canteen, sloshing around and pattering against the steel inside, but when he tips it back to drink, he can never seem to salvage those last few drops.

As though that singular hope of seeing Lance and Shiro again was trapped somewhere in his aorta, always just on the brink of breaking free, but never quite managing.

Always on the brink of giving up, but somehow, finding the strength to wake up in the morning. To eat the same tasteless food, to walk the same worn paths, to live the same silent, static existence—forever trapped in the long pause just between the last horrible thing and the next, just waiting for whatever tragedy he’d also be too stupid or blind to understand until it was already far too late.

Even still, despite everything, he knows that he only survived it because of Lance and Shiro. He knows, without a doubt, that he never would have been strong enough to brave any of this, if it weren’t for the hope that somehow, he could do right by them.

And even still, as he hides away from Lance’s hard, accusatory eyes, he wants to kiss him. He wants to sink back into his arms. He wants to hold him close, to apologize, to tell him that he never would have left if he’d known that everything would end up this way.

He wouldn’t have run away if he’d known how much Lance had needed him. If he’d known that he’d keep that dumb lighter with him, all this time.

He’d shoved away from the group once Shiro had been placed as comfortably as he could be on his futon. The big guy, Lance’s friend, had given him a look as though he might have wanted to follow him outside when he left. Keith had prepared himself for some kind of fight, but nothing had become of it.

Lance had talked to his friends, he’d coaxed them into leaving Shiro alone to rest.

Keith still isn’t sure where they’d decided to go, but he’d hid behind his shack until it was clear that the dust had settled and he wouldn’t run into any of them. He’d felt like an idiot then, for hiding from guests in his own home, but he wasn’t sure if he could deal with any of it anymore.

He’d felt over-stimulated. He’d felt as though, with just one more awkward conversation, just one more touch of a warm hand against his skin, he might not have been able to function for the rest of the night.

He definitely never got used to touch before he left the Garrison. He hadn’t understood how people could just reach out and be close to one another—how it never felt overwhelming, how they never felt itchy or overheated. How they never felt as though at any moment, it wasn’t going to feel good anymore.

But he’d been better back then, at least, than he feels that he is now.

Because now, even just feeling other bodies within reaching distance has him so frazzled that he can barely keep his thoughts straight.

He drags in a deep breath, combing a hand through his hair. The early-morning heat is just beginning to creep into the air, in place of the frigid cold of the desert night. The sun is skimming the horizon, far away. It will be another hour or so until it rises completely, and he can still see the stars, clinging stubbornly to the fading remnants of the night sky.

He feels tired, but far too strung out to sleep. He wonders how long it might be before Shiro wakes up.

How long it might be before he finally figures out what to say, how to confront Lance.

How long it will be before he finally pulls his head out of his ass, or everyone gets tired of waiting and just leaves without him.

He’d always thought that Shiro was too patient. He’d always wondered where the breaking point was—how weird he could be accidentally, how many situations he could make needlessly uncomfortable just because he didn’t understand how to be normal. How many times he could chase people away or how terribly he could tarnish his own reputation, before Shiro finally got sick of it and wiped his hands of their relationship.

Shiro, over the many years that they’ve known each other, has always waited patiently. He’s always stalled just long enough for Keith to finally catch up.

But Lance is not a patient person. And Keith has a whole lot of trouble figuring out how he could have possibly clung to the hope that Keith or Shiro would return after so long—when realistically, a happier life was just as easy as convincing himself that they weren’t worth the heartache anyway.

And he’s left with the startling realization that maybe, he never knew Lance quite as well as he thought that he did. Because Lance was capable of suffering through everything, just for tonight. He was capable of helping Shiro escape to somewhere safe.

He was capable of proving Keith wrong in every conceivable way—because he wasn’t fine without Keith. He didn’t learn to move on. He didn’t immediately latch himself onto the next best thing, and he never gave up on them.

He wonders, guiltily, if Lance’s friends understand how terribly he must have hurt Lance. He wonders, gritting his teeth and wiping down his hovercar for the third time before he’s finally willing to dig the tarp out of the shed, if maybe that’s why the big guy had seemed so angry with him.

He’d heard all of them digging around in the shed earlier—the hushed, rapid whispers. The judgmental words.

_ “Does he really only have canned beans in here? That’s all he’s been eating?!” _

_ “Where does he shower? Please tell me he’s been showering.” _

_ “How could someone live like this?” _

And, of course, he’d felt like an idiot. He’d felt lower than the dirt caked in the creases of his boots. He’d wanted to storm over there and tell them to take their grubby hands off of his food, to stop rooting through his things if they were only going to insult them.

He’d wanted to ask them,  _ “Why does it matter? It’s not your life, not your shelter. Why do you care?” _

And he didn’t know why he was so defensive about any of it, not at first.

Not until he’d heard Lance talking—as he pressed himself against the corner of his shack, ignoring the splintered wood digging into his skin. As he’d squinted through the darkness in a pathetic attempt to make out any of their blurry figures stepping out of the shed into the night.

_ “Keith doesn’t care about that kind of stuff, okay? Not—not when he has his mind made up that something else is more important. He’s always been the kind of person who puts basically everything else above himself.” _

The big guy had apologized then, and he still isn’t sure why. He’d wondered if it was something in Lance’s expression, that he couldn’t make out through the dark. He’d wondered if it was the lilting of his voice, or the wet sound of it. If maybe the big guy was just more in tune with Lance’s emotions that he’d seemed capable of when Keith met him, or if maybe they’d gotten so close over the months that they were just…  _ that _ connected.

He’d tried, in vain, to convince himself that he was just jealous that another person got to see Lance that much. He hadn’t been gauging how close they’d been standing to each other, comparing it to how close Lance used to stand to him and Shiro.

And he hadn’t been wondering if maybe Lance _ had  _ moved on, and he’d just been returning the lighter as a bold, undeniable sign that he was finally done with all of this.

The smaller one, the one who he continues to confuse with Matt, had clicked his tongue, slamming the door behind him with a force that had rattled the fragile foundation and Keith’s own nerves.

_ “I guess you know him better than we do, Lance,”  _ he’d said,  _ “but he sure seems like an asshole to me.” _

And he’d clapped his hand over his mouth, pulling himself around the corner in fear of drawing attention to himself when Lance had responded,  _ “Oh, he is. He’s definitely an asshole, but… he’s still… kind of amazing. Y-you know, living like this for Shiro. Leaving everything behind just because he thought he’d found something more important.” _

_ “I don’t think we could have saved Shiro without him, man.”  _ the big guy had said.

And Lance hadn’t responded to that, but maybe there was something else telling in his expression, in his words, or in his voice. Because the big guy had apologized again, and when Keith finally found the strength to peer around the corner, he could see the three of them making their way back into his house.

The big guy’s arm had been slung around Lance’s shoulders. He’d swallowed his jealousy with a fervor that had impressed even himself.

He still isn’t sure how any of that had made him feel either, but for whatever reason, he’d felt his overwhelming need to make things right grow only stronger. Because Lance had talked about him with a tenderness that he hadn’t deserved. He’d defended him when he didn’t have to.

And he still cared, after so much time had passed—after Keith had left him, so unforgivably. After Keith had made such a mess of everything and forced him to pick up the pieces.

Cursing under his breath, Keith pushes his hair out of his face. He shrugs off his jacket and allows it to fall to the ground. He’s smudged with dirt and oil now, wondering if he has enough water still saved up to wipe himself off before everyone wakes up.

They’ll judge him if he’s dirty, he’s sure, but he isn’t sure why he even cares.

He isn’t sure why it matters if Lance’s friend, who doesn’t know how to keep his hands to himself, or that unsettling Matt-clone think that he’s some kind of filthy desert hobo who spends his time setting off bombs and kidnapping random famous pilots in the middle of the night.

He doesn’t know why he wants to make a good impression on Lance’s dumb friends. It shouldn’t mean anything. It shouldn’t matter.

But still, it does.

He’s so completely hopeless. He covers his face with his hand, smudging more oil against his sweaty cheeks.

It shouldn’t be this hard to apologize.

It shouldn’t be this hard to face a moron like Lance.

But it is.

And so, he continues hiding away outside, convincing himself that he absolutely cannot see Lance until he organizes all of the cans in the shed.

 

* * *

 

Shiro sleeps fitfully, but, for the most part, he stays still.

Lance settles in next to him, wrapping himself in a faded blanket that scratches uncomfortably against his skin. Pidge and Hunk put themselves to sleep as they debate about some boring, sciencey nonsense that he couldn’t care less about. But, before he knows it, they’re snoring next to each other across the room, under the weird, curtained-off corkboard that none of them have had the guts to uncover yet.

It’s barely big enough in here to fit all of them. There’s a table held up with cinder blocks, gigantic, old computers shoved in the corners, whirring just beneath the sound of Hunk and Pidge’s breathing, beneath his own sputtering heartbeat, beneath Shiro’s murmurs in his sleep.

He tries to imagine Keith living in a place like this. He tries to imagine him pinning the calendar to the wall, wiping the dirt from the windows, hanging up the sheets to block the sun. He tries to envision Keith eating his dinner in here—cans and cans of sodium-packed beans that he knows must not taste like anything to him anymore. He tries to imagine him waking up on the futon in the middle of the night, reaching over to the table and unscrewing the lid from his water bottle.

He tries to think about him, all alone here. How he might react to the eerie sounds in the night, how he might wrap himself up in one of these itchy blankets when he got cold, or how he might use the corners to wipe the sweat from his brow when it got too hot.

He imagines Keith collecting all of these things and making a home out of nothing. He wonders, with a sardonic smile, if that’s exactly the type of thing that Keith did in both his and Shiro’s hearts.

He can’t deny that he’s still angry with Keith, or that he’s still hurt.

But as he peers around this pathetic little home in the darkness, he can’t stop himself from slowly forgiving him.

There had been a part of him that thought that Keith was dead. There was a part of him that thought he might never see him again.

But he’d never imagined that he’d be living like this. That he would have pulled everything together, somehow, just as he always has. That despite all odds, he’d survive again. That, despite everything that anyone had expected of him, he’d be strong enough to keep moving forward.

He won’t deny that he’s always envied that aspect of Keith’s personality—how pragmatic he is, how stubborn he can be. How, against all odds, he always manages to stay afloat. How, regardless of the mysterious tragedies sleeping in his past, he’s still grown into an amazing person, who loves tenaciously, who does everything with such astounding level of passion.

Who could live like this, when Lance already can’t stand it after just a few hours.

He wants nothing more right now than to keep being mad. Than to wrap himself up in his rage and continue to blame Keith in place of understanding why he must have felt such a strong urge to leave everything behind.

He wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he finally offers an apology. He wants to punch him again, to hit him until he finally admits that none of this was okay. That he should have said something. He should have reached out and asked for help, should have explained what he was planning to do, where he was planning to go.

He should have tried harder, at least, to make Lance leave with him too.

But he knows, deep down, that he would have chosen to stay behind.

He was too much of a coward back then to make a move when Keith did. He was too stupid, too in denial about everything. He was so eager to trust the Garrison’s word when Keith had questions. He was too weak and too stupid to see the truth that Keith had spread out so clearly in front of him.

And there’s a moment, in his horrible, traitorous mind, in which he wonders if maybe he should be the one apologizing.

Before heatedly, he chases that thought away.

He doesn’t expect an apology anymore. Not from someone like Keith, and not after everything that he’s seen.

But even still, he wants to understand.

Keith has been hiding somewhere for hours now, artfully avoiding him when he’d went outside, creeping somewhere in the shadows just out of sight, no matter how much he’d struggled to find him without alerting Hunk or Pidge.

This entire shack feels a whole lot like a grave. It feels a whole lot like the place that he would have found Keith’s bones, if he’d ever been brave enough to wander out into the desert to look for him. He can’t shake the feeling that Keith would have withered away here, if Shiro had never come crashing back down to Earth. He can’t stop himself from thinking about all of the  _ ‘what if’s _ —the terrible, ugly imaginings of what could have happened if nothing had worked out the way that it did.

Keith, begging him to come along and himself, forever the coward, refusing. Keith, hopelessly lost, having never stumbled upon this place. Keith, getting caught stealing rations from the Garrison, and whatever would have happened to him after that.

Shiro, forever trapped wherever he escaped from, and neither of them ever knowing what had become of him. Growing only bigger and harder, paler and so different from who he was just a year ago that maybe they wouldn’t have even recognized him. Dying there, in whatever trench he clawed his way out of, and never knowing how much they missed him. How Lance cried for him, how Keith threw everything away just to find him.

And Keith, staying outside forever if he has to, and never garnering the nerve to actually face him like a normal person and talk this out.

He bites down the growl that’s growing in his throat, rolling his eyes and pushing all of his annoyance out of him in the form of a heavy breath through his nostrils.

He turns then, the aggravated edges softening inside of him as he peers down at Shiro’s sleeping face. The moonlight filters through Keith’s flimsy, makeshift curtains, bathing the translucent porcelain of Shiro’s skin in silver. He looks like a ghost here, floating just beyond Lance’s fingers. He looks like something right out of a dream.

It takes Lance a moment to gather the courage to reach out—to brush the damp bangs from his face, to draw his fingers over the pallid smoothness of his cheekbones. His lips are chapped. There are dark circles hollowed beneath his eyes.

He’s all bones and muscles. He’s all hard edges where he used to be so soft. He’s just about as corpse-like as Lance ever imagined him floating out in space, and for a moment, he wonders if he was brought back to life before he fell down to Earth.

If he really was dead and not just missing.

If Keith’s determination alone might have ignited the fire of life deep inside of him, when Lance’s willingness to accept his fate might have swallowed it up.

And the guilt comes with the sadness. The tears prickle at the corners of his eyes.

It’s a cold night, and the cold seeps through the cracks in the windows, crawls under his clothes and clings relentlessly to his skin. Shiro dwarfs his own scratchy blanket. He’s so big and so misplaced here, as though Keith’s taken him and tacked him here haphazardly—like a brand new calendar on a sun-stained wall. Like a Military-grade water bottle set capless on a plywood coffee table. Like high tech machinery whirring in a shack barely big enough to fit four people.

None of this feels quite right. No matter how long he continues to touch Shiro, he still can’t bring himself to believe that any of this is real.

He’ll wake up tomorrow in his bed. He’ll wonder why he keeps having these dreams—where Shiro is back and they can begin to rebuild. Where Keith returns to him after so many hopeless months have passed, and he forgives him effortlessly. Because he’s missed him that much.

He’ll face another long day in a place that he’s grown to desperately despise.

He’ll pretend that he’s getting better, that he’s allowing himself to get over all of this, just so Hunk won’t have to worry about him anymore.

He’ll pretend that he didn’t cause all of this somehow—by ignoring the warning signs, by allowing Shiro to leave without a fight. By never fixing Keith, or appreciating Keith, or  _ knowing  _ Keith like Shiro knew him. By not paying enough attention or just  _ doing enough _ . By never being exactly who he needed to be in order to keep everything under control.

He rests his head against the arm of the futon, threading his fingers through the whitened tuft of hair between Shiro’s eyes. He reminds himself of how much he used to love these silly, longer strands. How much they would sometimes infuriate him. How, at times, he’d wondered why Shiro didn’t just commit to the military haircut and shave the stupid thing off.

How it always seemed so strange to him, this small rebellion. As though maybe it was the extent of Shiro’s ability to be bad. As though maybe, he secretly thought that it made him look cool, as though he cared just enough to look properly presentable, but also cared so little that he couldn’t fall in line completely.

And he wonders if, maybe, Keith thought that it was cool too. If maybe, secretly, he thought that Shiro was just as awesome and defiant as Shiro hoped that people would.

He thinks about the first time that he touched Shiro. How he’d felt as though the world was ending because such a heartthrob knew his name. How it had felt, in that moment, as though the entire existence of the universe around him would shatter if he so much as considered touching a God with dirty fingers. How Shiro surely had no idea how high of a pedestal Lance had built him up on—how in reality, Shiro was probably nervous too. Maybe, he thinks, even more than Lance himself was, when he’d struggled to reach out and run a hand over Shiro’s damp chest.

He presses his smile into the arm of the couch, laughing at himself silently for all of the times that he’d told himself,  _ ‘this has to be the end.’ _

Despite everything, despite all the horrible things that they’ve put each other through, they’re together now. He doesn’t want to tell himself that they’ll have more time. He doesn’t want to fool himself into thinking that their small world isn’t just as fragile as it must have been so many months ago, before all of this.

He doesn’t want to get his hopes up, thinking that Keith won’t leave again. That Shiro will manage to stay safe and stick around. That everything won’t continue changing, until he’ll find himself in this exact same place later on, wondering helplessly,  _ ‘Why did all of that seem like such a big deal?’ _

But he allows himself to enjoy this moment, to cherish the feeling of Shiro’s skin against his hand. To revel in the realization that Keith, as well, is lingering somewhere close by.

For a moment, everything is just the same as before.

They’re together, they’re safe. And nothing between them has been irreparably damaged or torn apart.

They’re happy, for this brief moment. For this tiny, fleeting pause in time. They can start again, just where they left off.

The first light of the morning sun stains the sky beyond the window with swatches of orange, then pink, bleeding through the star-speckled black.

His blanket is itchy, but it’s still cold. Shiro is shivering too, under a matching blanket, that looks more like a dishrag compared to his newfound girth.

Lance draws in a deep breath, pulling his blanket from his shoulders and leaning forward to splay it out over Shiro’s exposed feet.

He watches as Shiro stops shaking, as the residual tense lines of his expression smooth out.

And eventually, he manages to slip into sleep.

On a dusty hardwood floor, in a dilapidated shack in the middle of nowhere.

With one boyfriend, barely the same person, barely managing to fit on a lumpy futon just above his head.

And the other, still hiding away. Still running, after all this time.

 

* * *

 

It’s either death, or it’s a dream.

The blurry memories of how he got here slip away.

He’s aching all over, stretched out and worn apart, tearing at the seams. He’s a rag doll splayed out precariously on the edge of a small, scratchy couch. His bleary eyes crack open, his pupils stinging as they find light.

And it’s the light itself that makes him think that none of this is real—because he hasn’t seen natural light in many, many months. In such a long time that he isn’t sure if he’ll ever see it again.

No one is poking him or prodding him, but he can feel the eyes watching. He can feel them like hot embers prickling against his skin, burning deep inside of him. He wants to lash out, to tell them to look away, to stop staring at him like some kind of sideshow attraction— _ ”I’m alive!” _ he wants to tell them, _ “I’m a living, breathing thing and you did this to me! You made me a monster! It wasn’t my fault! I wouldn’t have done those things if it hadn’t been for you!” _

He isn’t sure who he’s trying to convince, but his thoughts are scattered, crawling around like a million tiny, black ants. Like a million dead eyed rabbits watching him from a hunter’s big fist, like a million screaming onlookers thirsty for his bloodshed—like a million long hours spent agonizing over all of the time and the memories that have slipped like sand through his fingers since he was stolen away.

There is terror, in that moment—in the long pause in which he expects to finally understand where he is, but nothing comes. No needles, no scalpels. No fingers in his skin. No roaring crowd, no cramped cages. No hard, damp floor. No rabbits, no ropes. No little boys watching him through the tall, black bars of an orphanage.

No voices screaming for mercy in the perpetual buzzing of his thoughts.

But the world around him fades from fuzzy unconsciousness, and he realizes, finally, that he’s surrounded by human faces.

Two boys huddle together in a small, cluttered corner of a room that he doesn’t recognize. And he doesn’t recognize them either, not at first. The short one with the glasses looks familiar in a way that he won’t piece together for many weeks. The tall one offers him a nervous, lopsided smile. And he realizes then that it’s Lance’s friend. The one who he’s seen him talking to in the halls at the Garrison.

“Shiro… how are you feeling?”

There’s a voice—soft and gentle, warbled with so much emotion that he feels his heart hitch up into his throat—so close to his ear that he jumps. He’s so exhausted that it hurts to turn his gaze. He’s so weary that he allows himself to pretend that any of this is actually happening.

Through the blur of his unfocused vision, he can make out the blue-gray smear of eyes, drawing nearer. He resists the urge to turn his head away, because these eyes are hard not to look at. They’re wide, glassy. They’re staring at him as though he’s fragile, human. As though he might crumble in this person’s hands.

The memories ease in, slowly. The pieces of conversations. The guarded, checkered smile. The fingers brushing against his through tall, black bars. The whispers of words in a steamy locker room.

The laughter, like bubbles rising in soapy water—quiet at first, then so much, all at once. So much that he feels his chest swelling up with the memories, as though he’s so filled up with them that he might explode.

And it’s Keith.

God,  _ it’s Keith _ .

Beautiful and sad, concerned for him. Reaching out with shaking fingers to wipe a wetness from his cheeks that he doesn’t understand. Biting his lip as another shadow close behind him reaches out to place a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“He needs to rest.” Another familiar voice. “Looks like… he’s been through a lot.”

It’s Lance’s dewy smile. Lance’s hollow laugh. Lance’s gentle hand pulling Keith away from him, ghosting over his back, leading him somewhere else where he can collect his thoughts without lashing out at anyone.

He knows that Lance is good for Keith, that Lance must have been taking care of him. He wonders how close the two of them have gotten while he’s been away.

“Guys, come on, let Shiro get some rest.”

The shorter boy hesitates for a moment, but eventually, both of them leave as well.

Before he slips back to sleep, he feels a warmth combing through his hair. He feels a gentle voice vibrating all around him.

He can hear the hurt swimming in Lance’s voice, can feel the softness of his lips as they press against his forehead.

“Get some sleep, Shiro. You’re safe now.”

And suddenly, there’s nothing but blackness.

His dreams mend together the jagged pieces of memory—the only things that he can collect now from days and weeks and months of captivity that all bleed over each other in a harsh clash of sensation, and sound, fear and hatred, and emotions that he can’t even begin to put a name to.

There are the glowing eyes, the bright, sharp smiles. The needles, the scalpels, and the knives, the experiments. The booming voices, the blood on the ground.

There’s a monster looming in the shadows of an arena, the Galaxy Garrison commanders saluting him as he boards a ship. There’s a crew with blurry faces, telling him about life in ice shards on Kerberos—there’s a long list of friends and higher-ups who he can no longer remember by name.

And there’s Keith, holding him closely one last time as he says goodbye.

There’s Lance, with tears in his eyes, struggling to make a joke to make it all feel better.

There’s crying somewhere in the deepest distance of his dreams—a pathetic, desperate wailing for help, for death, for some kind of end to all of this. There’s the glint of medical instruments in a bright, blinding light. The feeling of strong, leather straps holding him down to something unforgiving and hard.

There’s the roaring cheer of a crowd, filling him up with anger, with fear, with loneliness.

And there’s pain.

So, so much pain.

When Shiro jerks awake, the morning sun is just beginning to filter through the windows. A soft breeze blows the sheet-curtains forward and back—the dim light illuminating the dirt stains, the dust in the air, the cracks in the ceiling and the long scuff marks on the floor. He still isn’t entirely sure where he is, but there are sleeping bodies all around him.

This is the closest that he’s been to another human in a very long time.

As his eyes adjust to the darkness, Shiro counts the people in the room. There’s Lance’s friend—Hunk, he remembers—and the short boy from earlier, who he still can’t place. He can’t spot Keith, no matter how many times he scans the room, and the realization that he isn’t here stirs anxiety in his chest.

Just below him, snoring lightly on the floor, he finds Lance.

And he reaches out slowly—carefully, painstakingly—and brushes his flesh hand against Lance’s cheek. It’s smooth and warm. It’s softer than anything that he’s felt in months. His fingers catch on the sweat beading at Lance’s forehead, tangle in his damp hair. He’s mumbling now, drawing his brows close together. He’s slowly opening tired eyes and peering up at Shiro in the dark.

“I-I’m sorry,” Shiro whispers, his voice cracked and raw, “I—I didn’t mean to wake you, I just… I wanted to… to make sure that you were real.”

Before he can pull his hand away, Lance reaches up and grasps him around the wrist. His fingers are just as long and graceful as they were in the images that bubble up in Shiro’s scattered memories. He’s just as tender, just as attentive, but far less hesitant than Shiro thinks he used to be.

“I’m real,” Lance tells him quietly, “I know, it’s—it’s all kind of crazy, isn’t it? I still can’t really believe it either…”

There’s silence now, as Lance continues this small amount of contact, and Shiro’s fingers thread through his hair. As the two of them lie together and breathe together, settle back into a semblance of whatever they must have been before all of this.

“Where is Keith?” He hears himself ask, more than he makes the decision to actually ask it.

He still feels outside of himself. He still feels like a shadow watching his life move around him from somewhere just outside of the room.

Lance releases his wrist, shoving himself up from the floor onto his elbows. He lets out a soft groan as he squints, straining his eyes and mumbling under his breath.

“I don’t know,” he practically sneers, “He’s such a flake. He’s been avoiding everyone since we brought you back here.”

That doesn’t sit well with Shiro. Everything about it feels wrong. He can’t rely on his memory entirely, not while his thoughts are still stammering along at such a neck-breaking rate, but his stomach lurches at the sound of it. Lance’s jaw is tight as he speaks, and his fingers tighten ever-so slightly around Shiro’s wrist. He flicks his gaze away, just as he grits the words out, and Shiro knows that something happened.

He knows that Lance isn’t going to be willing to tell him everything either—not with how gently he’s treating him right now. Not as he’s behaving as though Shiro is anything but an unsightly mass of stony muscle and thick, leathery skin. As though somehow, no one is quite willing to address the fact that he’s become such a monster by now that surely, nothing could ever hurt him again.

But he knows, deep down, that Lance has always been very good at sensing the painful things that rest inside of him. Lance has always been very careful not to hurt him, or push him too hard. And at times, he knows, Lance has been willing to excuse bad behavior just because he’s convinced himself that someone like Shiro could do no wrong—and he can’t remember examples, not right now. But these feel like truths anyway, and he accepts the idea that maybe that’s the best proof he might get for a long time.

Until his memories hopefully return to him and he can finally understand with certainty what his instincts are trying so desperately to tell him right now.

“Did you guys have a fight?”

His voice sounds about as rough as it feels, as it drags through his throat. Lance pauses, and despite his sudden, sour expression, he reaches out with his free hand and grasps the water bottle on the table.

He pushes himself forward then, onto his knees, and holds the bottle to Shiro’s lips. Shiro tries not to feel too embarrassed about it—being fed like a child—as the water soothes the itch in his throat, and Lance runs a comforting hand through his hair as he pulls the bottle away.

Before he can say his thanks, Lance mutters at least some semblance of an explanation—as he sets the bottle so roughly onto the table that it shakes on its cinder block legs.

“Things… weren’t great after you disappeared. I—I mean, it wasn’t your fault at all, but… we’re not… getting along, I guess. You know how Keith is. He’d rather rough it out in the wilderness than address things head-on.”

Shiro nods his head, humming in understanding despite the fact that he can’t exactly remember if that’s the sort of thing that’s normal for Keith or not. He catches the wisps of memory, of a child dashing off over a snowy hill, of a kiss still warm on his lips. Of Lance howling in an otherwise silent library, of Shiro himself laughing as he sits on the ledge of a roof, gazing down at Lance as he tells some kind of story.

These things feel as though they should make sense, and it seems to him that Lance knows Keith a lot better than he does, for now. So he elects to believe him, for the sake of being supportive. For the sake of carrying on this facade that his mind right now isn’t a mess of sharp memories all prodding a headache just above his browline. That he’s different on the outside, but somehow, everything inside has remained completely intact.

“Have you tried talking to him?”

He isn’t sure why that seems like the wrong thing to ask, but Lance doesn’t recoil quite as dramatically as he feels like he should. He only drops his head down, crossing his arms over his chest. He’s sitting cross-legged now, sucking in one side of his cheek.

After a moment, he pushes out a sigh, finally meeting Shiro’s eyes again.

“I know I should,” he says, “Like, I know Keith’s probably not gonna come around. He  _ should _ , but… he won’t. I feel like, maybe, I just need to accept the fact that he’s never going to be any good at this kind of thing? Like… _ feelings _ , you know? I think my problem is that I keep expecting for him to just know how to do things, like comforting someone or apologizing. Or just… not running away all the time. But maybe he can’t. Maybe I’m just asking for too much.”

Shiro nods again, hums again. He wishes that he were capable of getting up right now, of shoving himself up and closing the distance between them. Of holding Lance and comforting him in all of the ways that Keith apparently cannot.

But that doesn’t feel right either. That suggestion feels wrong. He remembers again, for a fraction of a second, the boy with the bruised face, with the dirty bandages, taking a Tupperware box from his outstretched hands. He thinks about a smile with far too many black gaps in place of teeth.

He thinks about a boy with sad eyes, telling him that he’s happy for him. That he’s not mad that he didn’t tell him _ something _ , that everything will be okay.

“I don’t… I don’t think he’s incapable of those things,” he finds himself saying, carefully, as to not give too much of his lack of knowledge away, “But it’s different for Keith. His idea of comfort is different than yours or mine. And if he hurt you, he still owes you an apology. He’s capable of that, even if he acts like he isn’t sometimes.”

This draws a laugh out of Lance, at the very least. It lightens the air between them, just enough that Lance doesn’t seem quite as weighed down by the burden of his own thoughts anymore.

Shiro finds the strength to reach out a hand, but his fingers fall just a few inches short of Lance’s face. Lance’s smile is soft, when he leans forward. His eyes slip closed as he presses his cheek into Shiro’s palm.

“I’m really happy that you’re back,” he says quietly, “I really… didn’t know what to do with myself while you were gone.”

His mind is a stereoscope of splintered memory—of small moments that seem so nondescript as he watches them, but feel like a levy threatening to burst, the moment that Lance stops touching his hand.

There’s Lance, with red-rimmed eyes and tear-stained cheeks, telling him that he loves him on the ledge in front of a wide, glass-walled room. There’s Lance, smiling with glassy eyes, saying goodbye. There’s Lance staring at him with the most starstruck expression, through a darkened, crowded auditorium. There’s Lance, with that adorable, dopey, lovestruck smile and half-lidded eyes, whispering sweet words from between his legs, moving in and out of him so slowly and gently, with so much more tenderness and so much more love than he feels like he’s ever deserved.

“You should talk to him,” Shiro says, as his thoughts jam up, crowd together into such an indecipherable blare of noises and bright lights that he can barely focus anymore, “I know that he loves you just as much as I do… I know… if you guys had a fight, he’s probably only avoiding you because he thinks that you might not forgive him. But… you guys need to take care of each other, okay? You need to… be there for each other.”

He’s standing outside of a gigantic ship, surrounded by saluting officers, by a family with blurry faces, snapping photos together. By Keith, then a disheveled Lance, arriving late but just in time.

Under the heat and the orange glow of the sun, his boots crunching in the desert sand. He’s telling the two of them to take care of each other. He’s stepping away, unable to hug them or to kiss them, or to tell them how much they mean to him—in fear that a higher up might hear him.

He’s tucking himself away on that big ship, shooting off into an unknown future. Into the bright room with the needles and the prying fingers. Into the gladiator’s ring, cowering behind pillars as a great beast waits for him to come out of hiding.

And Lance’s fingers are warm in his hair, his lips soft against his forehead.

“I’ll go find him,” he says, his voice so distant that it might as well be the tiny, black specks of waving people growing harder and harder to make out as his ship climbs up into the atmosphere, “Get some rest, Shiro. I love you.”

_ “I love you too,” _ is what he hopes that he says in return.

But he can’t hear himself, as he slips into the skin of a soldier returning to a dingy orphanage, to recruit a single, shaggy haired teenager with a smile that’s finally all white teeth.

Then an officer giving a welcoming speech to a crowd of tired students, and one boy who gazes at him as though he’s never seen a person so amazing in his entire life.

And a man, who must have been happy once, normal once—with regular hopes and fears—tucked between Keith and Lance, laughing and talking. Kissing, and making love.

He’s all of these men, one after another—back to back at intervals so quick that he can barely keep up.

But as he slips off into sleep, he can’t help but wonder if he’s any of those men anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there! Happy Thursday! So this chapter is the second-to-the-last! I’m actually really sad, thinking that next week will be our last week sharing this story. But I hope that you guys have enjoyed it so far! It’s been a very long ride. 
> 
> Also, this week's chapter title is based off of a Korean idiom: 가재는 게 편이라, or "The crayfish sides with the crab". It's fairly similar to "birds of a feather flock together", but it basically just means that hey! crayfish look kinda like crab, so they'd probably agree with each other! And people who have experienced similar things in life will probably also agree with each other or "side" with each other. I thought it was a pretty neat idiom anyway, and it was hard resisting it for a chapter where everyone was kinda... thinking similar thoughts!
> 
> Anyway, thank you for reading! See you next week!


	30. All Good Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The three of them are all still planets, orbiting the same sun.

It’s more quiet outside than Lance thinks that he’s ever experienced in his entire life.

The excitement of today is beginning to ebb away—replaced gradually by exhaustion, by the looming sadness that still hasn’t managed to dissipate within him, despite the reunion that he’s been shamefully dreaming of ever since Shiro took off for Kerberos.

And maybe he feels like a total moron for expecting some heartfelt, romantic ordeal, then messing it all up by resorting to violence at the first sight of Keith. Or maybe he’s just disappointed that Keith didn’t immediately drop to his knees and grovel like he should have.

Maybe he can’t stop thinking about how heavy Shiro had felt, held up between them. How his hand had been hard and cold, or the terror in his eyes as he awoke, strapped down to that horrible medical table. How he’d seemed, for a moment, as though he wasn’t surprised by any of this at all.

Lance swallows the growing lump in his throat, willing away the tears as they spring to the corners of his eyes.

Shiro is safe and asleep inside. Shiro is going to be okay. He’s here now, he’s back. And he didn’t leave on purpose. He didn’t abandon them for some new life in space. He didn’t mean to leave them just when things got hard.

Unlike Keith, he thinks to himself.

And while he wants to continue feeling bitter—while he would love to find where Keith is hiding out here and scream at him until he finally offers that much-deserved apology—Lance realizes, not nearly as surprised as he thinks that he should be, that he wants nothing more right now than to hold Keith close, and to remind himself, once and for all, that this is real and Keith isn’t going to leave him again.

He feels weak and silly. He feels like he doesn’t even deserve to be here, involved in this rescue mission, wrapped up in the conspiracy that he’d been too blind to recognize from the very start.

Pidge and Keith both knew that something was going on. They were both willing to put themselves on the line to figure out what the Garrison was hiding. Keith dropped everything the moment that the news of Shiro’s supposed death was announced. He collected clues all alone in this crappy shack in the middle of nowhere.

He did _ something _ when Lance could only mope around. He believed in Shiro when everyone else was eager just to forget.

He shakes his head, willing those thoughts away. He doesn’t need this guilt right now. He doesn’t need to keep beating himself up over this.

He just needs Keith.

And he finds him, within moments, shaking off a large tarp just around the corner of the shack—throwing it over the top of the hover-car that they rode here and digging what appear to be large tacks out of his dumb fanny pack before stepping back to admire his work.

He doesn’t notice Lance at first (at least, he doesn’t give Lance any indication that he’s noticed him), until he’s on his hands and knees, pressing the tacks through the corners of the tarp into the ground and tugging at it randomly to check the snugness.

“You can help if you want.” Keith says, just as quiet and brooding as he always has been in Lance’s lonely memories. “I have a feeling that we’re not coming back, so if I’m right… maybe someone else can use this stuff.”

Lance doesn’t speak up at first, and he doesn’t step forward to help either. He crosses his arms over his chest, leaning against the dusty, cracked siding of the shack and watching Keith work with manufactured boredom.

Keith doesn’t complain about any of it, and he doesn’t ask again. He continues to work silently for what feels to Lance like a very long time—like too long, considering the months that have already stretched between them since he left—and it’s beginning to feel as though he might never actually get that apology.

Typical, he thinks. He shouldn’t have been stupid enough to hope for anything better than this.

But he thinks about what Shiro told him, just moments ago.

_ “His idea of comfort is different than yours or mine.” _

He wonders if anything that Keith’s done over the last year could have been considered “comforting” in his own mind. And he wonders, for the first time since Keith left, if there might have been a reason for everything, that didn’t have anything to do with himself.

He feels, for a moment, as though maybe he’s been selfish. As though maybe he’d assumed all along that Keith leaving had more to do with himself being not good enough, and less to do with all of the mysteries surrounding the Kerberos failure.

And he wonders, if maybe, in Keith’s mind, all of this was for his own good. If maybe Keith realized too that he wouldn’t have lasted even five seconds in this unforgiving wilderness.

“You’re sure putting a lot of work into cleaning up before you leave this time,” Lance says finally, fidgety and uncomfortable as Keith continues to ignore him, “Would’ve been nice if you’d done the same last year.”

Keith’s quiet laugh doesn’t piss him off as much as he thinks that it should. If anything, it makes his heart beat faster. It makes warmth rise to his cheeks. It makes him feel, for a small, pathetic moment, as though somehow no time has passed and nothing has changed between them.

“They didn’t give me time. They said that I had twenty minutes to pack and came after me at fifteen.”

Lance feels as though his heart has crawled up into his throat. He feels as though he isn’t taking in nearly enough oxygen. His pulse skitters and jolts through his veins. He shivers helplessly in the chill of the desert night—wishes that he’d taken more time to consider what he would say in this situation and wasted less time feeling sorry for himself while Keith was gone.

“I thought you’d get over it eventually anyway. Like maybe… you’d meet someone new and you’d realize that you were better off without me.”

And the anger comes, finally. It rolls over him like waves. His fingers press hard into his arms. He straightens his posture, opens his mouth two or three times before he can find the right words to say. Keith spares him a short look—that horrible, flat-lined frown—as he tugs again at the edge of the tarp. He continues to fret over it, as though it’s not already finished, as though he’d rather continue to mess around than face this glaring problem head on.

And it’s not the Keith that Lance expected to find here: a coward, still running away. A sullen child shirking the consequences of his actions in place of the prickly, fire-eyed tornado of a man that he always built Keith up to be in his memories.

“You thought I’d _ forget about you _ ?!” He’s doing his best to yell while still whispering, lest he draw too much attention to the two of them and bring more people outside. Lest he wake up Shiro and disrupt, surely, the first good night’s sleep that he’s had in over a year. “You _ abandoned _ me, Keith! You fucked off to this stupid shack in the middle of fucking nowhere and left me there to deal with everything on my own! Shiro was gone, and everyone blamed the whole thing on him! And you just—y-you  _ ditched _ me there! To deal with everything by myself!”

His fists are clenched at his sides now, yearning for the pain and the crack of bone. For the warmth of Keith’s skin, for the impact of fist and face that he knows won’t make any of this better. He’s shaking violently, barely able to keep his voice even and quiet. His thoughts swim and his eyes feel embarrassingly wet. He feels as though he’s toeing the threshold of something terrible, something dark and foreboding and forbidden within himself.

He feels as though, if he doesn’t make Keith understand this, he might continue to fester in his ugly, bitter sadness until that’s all there is left of him.

“I  _ needed _ you, Keith! I-I needed someone to make everything okay! I thought I could count on you not to fuck me over, but you left—first chance you got! Do you know how shitty that is, Keith?! Do you know how it feels when the one person who you have left just disappears without a trace and you’re left behind to pick up the pieces?! Do you know how horrible it was, sitting at that shithole school every day for a year, wondering if you were dead too?!”

Keith is sitting very still now, his knuckles tense and white as he continues to grasp the edge of the tarp. He’s glaring at the dirt between his knees, biting down hard on his bottom lip, trembling so subtly that Lance barely notices it at first.

Lance can feel the wet heat of tears rolling down his cheeks, but he doesn’t make an effort to wipe them away. He doesn’t try to hide the pitiful weakness inside of him from Keith—not this time, not anymore.

He wants Keith to see this, to face it. He wants him to finally understand that there are consequences when he keeps running away.

“I get that I’m not  _ good _ like Shiro, Keith! I’m not worth giving a shit about! I-I can’t see the—the  _ “light” _ in people, I can’t pull my head out of my ass long enough to even remember that other people have feelings sometimes! I—I can barely take care of myself, and I definitely couldn’t fix all of the stuff that happened to you like Shiro could—”

"I don't need anyone to  _ fix  _ me," Keith cuts in, suddenly looking straight at him—his brows low and arched, his lips a flat line. Lance's eyes travel over the slope of his arms into his shoulders, his shoulders into his neck. He thinks about the tense, hard line of all of those muscles, how Keith is looking at him now as though he expects some kind of recognition, or even an apology. As though he thinks that Lance has any idea what he means.

With a short sigh, Keith pushes himself up from his knees, with his palms flat against the ground. He wipes his hands of sand, sends the flimsy tacks holding down the tarp a final forlorn look.

And he reiterates, as though he thinks that repeating himself will make Lance understand him.

"I didn't want you to fix me." His eyes are dying coals engulfing oxygen. The fire inside of him flares up, burns so hot that Lance almost looks away. "I just wanted someone to make me feel like it was okay to be me."

His hands come to rest on his hips. There's a confidence about him that Lance could never hope to achieve.

"So some shitty things happened, so what? Shitty things make shitty people every day. But no matter how far you run, Lance, you're still going to be the same, shitty person. The whole point is to meet people who make you feel like maybe that's okay."

For a short moment, they stare at each other. Lance finds relief in Keith’s determination, in his aloof confidence, even if he doesn’t entirely comprehend it. He finds relief in this version of Keith that he finally recognizes—the boy who’s always better at everything than he is, without even trying. The man who always has the answers, no matter how stingy he always seems to be with sharing them all at once.

Lance’s voice feels like sand, clogged in the deepest pits of his throat. It scrapes out of him, so quiet and unsure that he can barely hear it over the crickets chirping all around them.

"The whole point of  _ what _ ?"

Keith’s eyes widen immediately. His shoulders square up, his muscles tensed, rolled up tight and ready to pounce. His words are even, calculated and quick. He’s arguing in the same hushed tone as Lance is, as though the two of them have signed some kind of unspoken agreement that they want this entire exchange to take place with as few onlookers as possible.

"Of  _ everything _ , Lance!” His glare is so hot now that Lance is boiling in it. “Of breaking into the Garrison to find information! Or giving some stupid kid your breakfast, or just... chasing after some idiot at school until he likes you back—just  _ everything _ !"

Keith throws his hands up in the air in the most dramatic show of frustration that Lance has ever seen from him. He turns then, crossing his arms over his chest and biting the inside of his cheek, staring long and hard at the rocking chair creaking silently on his rickety front porch.

"I—I  _ know _ that I left you behind and I'm sorry, okay? I really didn’t want to hurt you like that. I know that I fucked everything up. I know that I don’t deserve you, and I definitely didn’t deserve you waiting around all this time for me, but... I just... I thought that you'd be better off without me. I thought that I could figure things out on my own or... rescue Shiro somehow, and maybe everything could go back to normal. I just—I really didn't think that you'd wait so long for me. I thought you'd forget."

The silence between them is heavy and thick, sticky in Lance's lungs as he thinks about everything that he might have expected for Keith to say when he'd ventured outside to find him.

Keith still isn't looking at him—still stares at his shabby little half-broken home with distant eyes, still chews on the inside of his cheek as though there are so many more things that he wishes that he could say right now.

For a moment, Lance wonders why he doesn't just say them, but it's Keith, he knows, and he also knows that this might be the most that he's heard Keith say since he met him.

"I just—" Keith bites down on his lip, and maybe it's a trick of the darkness, but Lance swears that his cheeks are splashed with color. "I liked who I was with Shiro, and... with you. And I wanted to keep being that person forever, so... even if it would've been better if I never talked to you again or whatever, I just... I'm not good enough, Lance."

He turns his eyes to Lance now—wide and dark and glassy. Lance thinks of the shadowy depths of the ocean, of wiping out on a big wave, of plunging down into the disorienting, swirling black, and of floundering helplessly in search of the surface.

He thinks of nearly drowning once, when he was thirteen—how he'd been turned around and juggled by the strength of the current, how it was so dark and so overpowering that he couldn't even tell which direction was up anymore.

"I can't do this without you, Lance."

This is how Keith makes him feel: like he's drowning helplessly at sea, like he's dizzy and exhausted. Like he'll bury himself in the black blanket of ocean, and he isn't even sure if he'll ever miss the air again.

Keith makes him feel like he’s sitting in the eye of a terrible storm, like he’s watching the whole world burn around him. Like he’s a child watching a hurricane on TV—so terrified and so small and helpless, but far too mesmerized to pull his gaze away.

Keith’s fingers are warm and rough when they reach forward and grasp his cheeks. His thumbs wipe slowly at the tears there, smear the wetness over his heated skin. And Keith looks fully into his eyes—not straight through him and not down on him. He looks at him like he used to look at Shiro. He looks at him as though he’s something fragile and precious that might not be around forever.

“I thought that I could fix everything if I left, but… no matter how far I ran, I still loved you, and I still missed you, and… I don’t think I can stop feeling like this.”

Lance watches him with wide eyes, croaks uselessly with an open, slack jaw. The tears slow and still, his heart thrums quickly in his chest. The world rushing around him creaks to a jarring halt—until he’s standing here alone with Keith in the black night, listening to his own pounding heartbeat and the insects chirping all around them. Until he can feel nothing but his own pulse and Keith’s hands on his skin, Keith’s lips on his lips, Keith’s breath hot and dewy on his chilly nose and cheeks.

When Keith pulls away, Lance doesn’t miss the wet sheen against his thick eyelashes, and he can’t ignore the small smile that tugs at the corners of his lips. Keith doesn’t let go of him, and he breathes hard and shaky. He hisses a curse, tips back his head and gazes up at the stars, grins wide and wry and lets out a hard bark of a laugh.

“I should have known.” he says, and there a dampness to his words, a low lull of his voice that quivers with a sadness that Lance never expected to hear from him. “I kept saying that I didn’t need you, but I do. It’s so stupid. I can’t—I can’t keep myself away from you no matter how hard I try.”

Like magnets, Lance wants to tell him, but his voice won’t work just yet. He can’t describe to himself what he’s feeling right now—how he can be so relieved and happy, how he can be so scared and sad. How he can feel the extent of every emotion all at once, how his heart can be so swollen with this confusing clash of sensations that he isn’t sure if he’d be able to stand straight without Keith’s hands holding him still.

Keith is the heat and the fire of Venus. Shiro is soft sand and the comforting ocean, the thriving life of Earth. And maybe sometimes Lance feels as small and as insignificant as Pluto. Maybe his journey to get here has taken him far too long.

But the three of them are all still planets, orbiting the same sun. They’re all three tiptoeing around the same lines, the same insecurities, and the same helpless love and warmth that keeps them coming back no matter how far away they travel.

He feels tethered here, to this moment. He feels as though this is just another beginning in the long story of his life. This is his grainy gray photograph moment. This is just another experience in a long list of memories that he’s made with Shiro and Keith—that he feels might resonate within him forever. That he might carry with him no matter where tomorrow might take him.

He kisses Keith again, because it feels like the right thing to do. And it feels wonderful to be able to kiss him, to be able to touch him and hold him close, to remind himself that none of this is a dream, and somehow, he’s found both of them alive and okay.

“Do you really think that we’re not coming back?” He asks as he pulls away.

Keith takes a moment to mull over how he’s going to respond. Lance can practically see the cogs turning in his head as he chews idly on his bottom lip. He wonders when Keith stopped seeming like such a mystery to him—when he began being able to understand him and read him. When these lulls in the conversation started seeming like opportunities for Keith to think, to work himself up to speaking again, instead of awkward silences that Lance had once wanted nothing more than to end.

And he wonders if Keith only seemed too quiet and too wrapped up in himself because no one ever gave him the chance to catch up. He wonders, if anyone ever took a moment of pause, if Keith could find the right words to say, instead of stumbling awkwardly through conversations and choosing to stay quiet in fear of making a fool out of himself.

Lance realizes now, after a year of dancing around each other, that Keith and himself aren’t so different after all. That they’re both afraid of showing anyone the weaknesses under their skin, the person who they are inside, the sadness and the insecurity that they carry with them everywhere, no matter how differently they choose to go about it.

This must have been what Shiro saw in him, all the way back when they first gazed at each other in that auditorium. Shiro must have sensed it, that he was similar to Keith. He must have known, somehow, that if the two of them ever managed to finally talk, they’d always end up at the same conclusions. They’d see things in the very same way, just through different lenses, through different lives. Through the very different ways that they’ve chosen to express themselves.

Shiro has spent many, many months taking care of the two of them, culminating these ideas in their heads, guiding them in the right directions. Lance wonders if they’ve ever appreciated him enough. He wonders if now, it’s too late to start.

But he wants to try, anyway. He wants to show Shiro that no matter how much he’s changed and no matter what happened to him before he came back to them, they’re not going to give up on him.

Just like he never gave up on either of them.

“I’m not sure.” is what Keith settles on, squinting up at the night sky as his hands drop from Lance’s face to rest on his shoulders. “I’ve had this feeling that something was going to happen since I got here, and I thought it would go away when I found Shiro, but… it’s only gotten stronger.”

It’s ominous, maybe, but he can’t deny the excitement that he senses emanating off of Keith, twinkling with the stars in his eyes. He can’t deny that he feels it too—with the fear and the loneliness in his chest, with the relief and the sadness and the regret still poking at his heart when he thinks about leaving the Garrison behind and never having the opportunity to explain to his mother why.

“It’s going to be dangerous.” Keith tells him.

And slowly, he nods.

He folds himself around Keith gradually, wraps his arms around those broad shoulders, rests his hands in the shallow curve of his back. He props his chin next to Keith’s ear, holds him closer, listens to the chirping and the howling of creatures in the night.

Neither of them speak for a long time, as they sit still in the calm before whatever awaits them tomorrow. He enjoys the feeling of Keith’s hands rubbing slow circles over his back, listens to the quiet beating of his heart.

He can’t do any of this without Keith and Shiro either.

But he thinks, with a sardonic smile at his own corny romanticism, that maybe he can do anything if they’re here with him.

He’s so quiet when he finally speaks that, for a moment, he worries that Keith won’t hear him. He says only Keith’s name, doesn’t move back or shake him, doesn’t make sure that he hasn’t fallen asleep standing up after all of the excitement of today.

But Keith hums his response, holds him closer. He can feel his breath hot against his collarbone. Lance whispers in his ear then, as his fingers inch up his back, memorizing the bumps of his spine, cataloging the startling warmth of his body and the way that his breath hitches in his throat and his hair tickles Lance’s cheek, as he tucks his face into Lance’s neck in his embarrassment.

Lance doesn’t stumble over his words and he doesn’t try to take them back. The resounding silence isn’t awkward or tense like it was before, so many months ago on the Garrison’s rooftop. His words are soft and light as air—his hands are gentle as they work out the stressed lines of Keith’s body.

He listens to the humming crickets and the coyotes crying out in the distance. He feels the dewy cold of the night clinging to his skin. He memorizes all of the lines of Keith’s body all over again, and he tells him, softly:

“I still love you too.”

 

* * *

 

The sun is just beginning to creep over the horizon the next morning, when the group wakes up and begins getting ready to leave. Hunk is complaining about his sore back and empty stomach, and he nearly panics when Keith offers him a can of the Garrison’s barely edible baked beans for breakfast.

“Dude, please don’t tell me that this is all you’ve had to eat for a  _ year _ !”

Keith raises a brow, setting the can on the cluttered surface of his desk and crossing his arms. He stares at Hunk as he whispers frantically and waves his hands around in the air, rambling about all of the sodium and the preservatives, how Keith must have felt miserable dragging himself out of bed every day when his only fuel was food that shouldn’t even have the gall to call itself food.

“They’re just beans,” Keith tells him flatly, shirking away when Hunk’s frenzy only worsens, “Why does it even matter? It still filled me up.”

Hunk is near tears. Keith looks fretful, sends Lance a pleading look for help, as he doesn’t seem to understand why Hunk cares so deeply about what he’s been eating when he’s only met him once before this.

Lance is surprised too, for a moment. He hasn’t missed the looks that Hunk’s been sending Keith since they got back here, how it might have seemed last night as though Hunk would hate Keith forever, as though he might actually garner the courage to confront him. It’s strange, at first, realizing that Hunk is just as eager to forgive and forget as he is—but maybe Hunk just can’t stand the thought of  _ anyone _ suffering, even if it’s his worst enemy. Even if it’s the person who hurt his best friend, and dragged out a whole lot of suffering a lot longer than it needed to be.

He can’t say that he blames Hunk for still being angry, even though he knows that Hunk can’t possibly understand it. Even if no one could comprehend what Keith must have went through when he’d left, how obviously he’d agonized over leaving Lance behind to deal with everything alone.

It’s a weird feeling, being hurt, but understanding why he was hurt. Forgiving someone without question, knowing that they’d been looking out for him, even if they’d done something terrible.

He doesn’t know if he could have been strong enough to do what Keith did, if he’d been in his position. He doesn’t know if he could have survived out here, if he could have even left in the first place. If he’d ever be strong enough or smart enough to even begin digging around for answers.

Lance rescues Keith, but he promises himself that he’ll demand some sort of payback later. Maybe a quick save from Pidge—who seems to have figured out exactly what’s going on since he formally met Keith. Maybe some kind of excuse when Shiro is coherent enough to question the entire truth about everything that happened while he was gone.

He slings an arm around Keith’s shoulders, leading him away.

“Don’t be such a  _ mom _ , Hunk,” he croons, his smile so much easier and more comfortably casual than it has been in months, “Not everyone has good taste like you, buddy.”

Keith is too thankful to be too offended, but he can feel Pidge’s eyes drilling tiny holes in his back. He isn’t sure how he feels about this, about someone else figuring him out before he has the chance to explain himself. And he isn’t really sure why he cares so much, when Pidge is the only one left who doesn’t know practically everything about his relationship with Keith and Shiro.

Maybe he’s still hanging on to the silly notion that Pidge might actually respect him. Maybe he thinks that Pidge just won’t understand.

But he’ll explain later, maybe, on his own terms. So to get away from Pidge’s prying eyes and Hunk’s blubbering, he asks Keith to show him to the showers.

“There aren’t showers,” Keith tells him flatly, “I just used a rag and some water.”

Okay, maybe Hunk was right. This really is heartbreaking.

He isn’t sure if Hunk ends up making the beans or not, but something delicious-smelling is cooking outside by the time that he and Keith gain enough nerve to wake Shiro up on the futon.

He’s patting himself dry after dumping a few bottles of water in his hair behind the shack, thankful that he’d taken a real shower with soap just a few hours before Shiro crashed down to Earth. There’s still dirt clinging to his clothes from the scuffle last night, and he reeks of campfire smoke and the musty stink of rotting wood and surely bug-infested old blankets, but at the very least, his hair is clean. And that’s all that he can hope for anymore.

He wonders, guiltily, if Keith was right not to bring him out here. He wonders how miserable he would have been in Keith’s position, and how miserable he would have made Keith.

And he wonders, for what feels like the billionth time, what sort of person Keith must have been before enlisting at the Garrison, that he could settle into a life like this without giving up immediately.

This masochistic train of thought is cut short when they make their way back into Keith’s house and he catches sight of Shiro—sleeping so peacefully that he almost forgets how much has changed. The deep scar across his nose and cheeks pangs something painful and hollow deep inside of his heart. And Shiro is bigger now, broader and too angular.

He’s all stony muscle and hard edges—faded, peppery hair and countless scars. He’s paler too, pale like Keith used to be—dark under the eyes, and speckled with the fading marks of needles, the angry red of uneven cuts just above that horrible prosthetic arm.

But it’s still Shiro, and this moment feels like a dream. He’s rooted to the floor as he watches Keith move forward to wake him, as his vision blurs around the edges and the morning light filtering through the windows adds a fuzzy outline to everything.

Shiro doesn’t jolt awake, and he’s surprisingly calm when he opens his eyes. Lance had been preparing himself all night for some kind of freak-out, some dramatic, terrible, emotionally exhausting ordeal that might bring a sense of realism to all of this.

But Shiro only stares up at Keith, doesn’t move an inch. They look at each other in silence for a long time, until Shiro’s eyes flick over to Lance as well—back and forth between them—and his eyes widen and realization washes over his face.

He realizes, slowly, that none of this is a dream.

He remembers how all of them saved him.

“We have to leave soon.” Keith tells him, so gentle and quiet. So careful. “Are you sure you’re ready to do this?”

In time, Shiro pushes himself up, with Keith’s help. Lance still can’t bring himself to move forward, can’t find the strength to ruin this illusion by helping too. Can’t risk this dream dissipating into another lonely morning if he tries to touch Shiro and realizes that he can’t actually feel him.

“I’ll be okay. This couch is more comfortable than it looks.”

His laughter is different. It’s a dull echo of the vibrato that Lance remembers. It’s a stilted, nervous thing—hesitant like Keith’s, sharper and more clumsy. Less practiced, more afraid.

He tries not to think about it too much.

“We can pack it up and take it with us if you want.”

It’s the first time that Lance has ever heard Keith actually make a real joke.

The world around him sharpens and the glow fades away. He can feel the cool of the morning melding into the thick heat of the day—can feel the sweat beading at his brow and at the nape of his neck. He can smell the sweetness of breakfast cooking over a campfire outside, can hear Hunk and Pidge laughing about something through the cracks in the window.

“Are you okay, Lance?” Shiro asks him, his voice more tired than Lance thinks it’s ever been before. “You look kind of pale.”

He nods, forcing down the emotions clogging up his throat, forcing back the embarrassing tears that threaten to roll down his cheeks. He stumbles forward, rests a trembling hand over Shiro’s shoulder, fights the urge to pull away when it’s so hard and wrong, and so different than the Shiro that he remembers hugging goodbye so many months ago.

“I’m okay now.” He half-lies. He convinces himself that it’s completely true. He watches Keith lean forward and plant a kiss against Shiro’s cheek—breath hitching as Shiro smiles, as that smile comes out lopsided and different, a ghost of everything that Lance remembers.

Almost right, just barely unfamiliar. He tells himself that he’ll get used to this with time. He tells himself that nothing really matters anymore, now that Shiro is home, now that he’s safe.

He allows Shiro to stand up then, to rest a gentle hand against his cheek and to lean in and kiss him. He allows himself to imagine that it feels the same as before—that it’s still Shiro at the Garrison. That it isn’t a shadow of a memory, a kiss that feels too tentative and clumsy. That he isn’t just now realizing that Shiro might never be the same man that he used to know, that he  might have come back wounded and forever changed, and that the memory of the person who Shiro used to be might never return to them again.

He doesn’t hate this Shiro. And he still feels himself melting into the kiss. He still tells Shiro that he loves him, and that he missed him, and he doesn’t have to lie about any of it.

But he feels anger, and he wants revenge. And when he looks at Keith, he knows that he feels it too.

They exchange these looks behind Shiro’s back as he leads them out of the shack. Keith’s eyes regain that sharpness and fire, all of the soft edges of his gentle smile hardening as the two of them think about everything that they’d love to do to whoever hurt Shiro like this.

And he knows, in this moment, that none of this will ever truly be over until they do that. That whatever lies in the caverns that Keith told them about, it will only be the beginning of a long journey—one that will hopefully lead them to these aliens. One that will hopefully allow them to figure out the Garrison’s role in this, to find the right person to blame, to find Shiro’s crewmates and rescue them as well. And to right all of the wrongs that happened far off in the night sky, tucked quietly behind the black between the stars and all of the secret files that the Garrison kept locked in private offices.

Keith slips his hand into Lance’s as Shiro steps forward to talk to Pidge and Hunk. The sky fades from the pinks and oranges of dawn into the clear blue of morning. Heat wraps around them like a heavy, itchy blanket.

Lance thinks about orbit and about the red strings of fate. He thinks about love and about fame, about Shiro’s soft smile as he talks about their plans. He thinks about how warm and smooth and comforting Keith’s fingers feel tangled around his own, about learning the new curves of Shiro’s body. About reminding himself how both of them feel wrapped around him and inside of him again.

And he thinks about space travel and aliens, about lions in dark caverns and mysterious auras. He wonders about Voltron, about where Shiro might have gone without them. He wonders where they’ll find themselves after today, where they’ll find themselves next year. If he’ll still be orbiting the same planets as he is now, or if he’ll be so different that he might not even recognize himself anymore.

He’s tired and he’s hungry and hot. There’s sand in his eyes and his clothes already reek. Pidge is staring at his and Keith’s hands clasped together, barely containing his knowing grin. Hunk is still complaining that Keith hasn’t kept any decent food in his shack.

But he’s standing here, among friends and lovers. He’s plotting out a venture that might change the course of the rest of his life.

While he might have felt terrified in this situation last year, he finds, with much surprise, that he only feels excited now. He’s ready for this, where he might have hesitated before. He’s eager to turn this page of his life, to end this chapter and start another. To make so many new memories that the loneliness and helplessness of the last few months starts to feel like nothing but a distant dream.

It’s the dawn of a new day, of a new life, of a new chance to finally be free.

And he takes it eagerly, with Shiro and Keith by his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is the end! 
> 
> There are quite a few people who helped me make this silly idea into a (completed) reality, so I wanted to take a moment to thank them. I’d like to thank **Aomine** for reading through this monster meticulously over the last few months and for pushing me to actually get these chapters done in a timely manner. For posting multiple chapter of multiple stories for me while I was away, and for sitting up for some very late nights going over all of the mundane writing stuff that comes along with being a beta. Truly, you were the backbone of this story, Aomine. And I don’t think I could thank you enough. I’d also like to thank **Traffy** , for always being so passionate about this story. Through the ups and the downs, you’ve been a continuous inspiration, and your support through everything means so much more to me than you know. Additionally, I’d like to thank **Julia** , for talking me through meta and different aspects of the plot. For being so excited and so forward with that excitement! With both you and Traffy, being able to talk to you guys about your thoughts after posting every week was a very huge honor! 
> 
> And I’d like to thank all of you for sticking with me through all of it! I know it’s a big mess of a story, and it’s been a very long ride! But it’s been so, so incredibly rewarding to be able to share this with all of you. Your comments, subs, and kudos have compelled me to see this all the way through, and everyone who has taken the time to read through this has earned a very special place in my heart. 
> 
> And finally, I’d like to thank **Muzuki** for always being so lovely, so thoughtful, and so engaging. You’re one in a million, dude, and I really, truly hope that this monster of a story made you feel even an ounce of the happiness that I feel, knowing that I’m lucky enough to have you in my life.
> 
> So that’s it! The final chapter. You might be thinking, ‘Well, where do they go from here?’ But while in my imagination, it continues into canon with that sweet Shklancey twist, I think whatever you might have in mind for the three of them is just as valid and good. Anyway, thank you so much for sticking around! I really, really hoped that you guys enjoyed it!

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  Contact Us:
> 
>  **Moth/flyingisland** : [tumblr](http://curionabang.tumblr.com), [twitter](https://twitter.com/MothIsland)
> 
>  
> 
> My Beta: 
> 
> **sierrah** : [tumblr](http://madamemauve.tumblr.com/), [twitter](https://twitter.com/s_s_s_sweets)


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